Role Description
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to shape the future of Dropbox through bold new ideas and technical leadership. You’ll help define the vision, architecture, and execution for our most forward-looking products — building the foundation for what comes next at Dropbox.
This role sits at the heart of innovation, blending hands-on engineering with strategic thinking. You’ll explore new product spaces, prototype ideas that don’t yet have a home, and guide how we integrate new technologies — whether we build them or bring them in. Along the way, you’ll help foster a strong, collaborative engineering culture and partner closely with product, design, and strategy to turn high-potential ideas into real impact.
Responsibilities
- Build and foster a strong engineering culture focused on excellence, velocity, and innovation
- Define the architecture and integration strategy for new initiatives, including both internally developed and acquired products
- Conduct technical due diligence on potential M&A targets to assess scalability, quality, and strategic fit
- Rapidly prototype new product ideas and validate emerging opportunities that fall outside existing teams
- Partner cross-functionally with product, design, and strategy teams to translate vision into technical execution
- Maintain a high technical bar and guide the team through complex architectural decisions
- Contribute to shaping Dropbox’s long-term innovation roadmap through technical insight and experimentation
Requirements
- 10+ years of full-stack engineering experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role
- Proven success operating at both startup and enterprise scale—building early MVPs and scaling to millions of users
- Deep understanding of product architecture evolution and trade-offs between speed and scalability
- Experience with technical diligence and evaluating software systems for integration or acquisition
- Some experience in engineering management preferred
- Strong bias toward experimentation and comfort navigating high-ambiguity problem spaces
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading 0→1 product development or founding early-stage startup teams
- Demonstrated success incubating and scaling new technologies or products within a larger organization
- Strong background in distributed systems design, data-intensive applications, or cloud infrastructure
- Familiarity with modern AI/ML technologies, developer platforms, or productivity tools
Compensation