Dropbox

Role DescriptionAs a Staff Software Engineer at Dropbox, you'll be the singular technical owner of application performance across the Core org — the part of Dropbox that owns every consumer-facing surface: web, iOS, Android, and desktop. This is one of the company's most visible, cross-cutting technical challenges. Your mandate is to make Dropbox feel fast on every surface our customers use. You'll operate at the intersection of measurement, engineering, and product impact, owning ambiguous problems that span the entire stack and translate directly into business outcomes for hundreds of millions of users. There is no existing performance team at Dropbox — you'll define the discipline. You'll start with the web, profiling our highest-traffic React surfaces, producing flame graphs and heat maps, identifying the most valuable opportunities, and driving fixes through to shipped, measured wins. The web is your initial focus and the surface where you'll be most hands-on. From there, you'll lead the performance initiative across iOS, Android, and desktop by partnering with the internal platform experts who own those clients — coordinating strategy, transferring measurement practices, and driving the work, rather than building everything yourself. You'll also work across the Python and Go backend services that all of these surfaces depend on, since perceived performance rarely lives in one layer. Your influence will extend across Core Engineering. You'll define the measurement standards, regression-detection systems, and performance practices that other engineers rely on. You'll also be expected to use AI fluently in your own engineering work and to lead the optimization of AI-assisted workflows across Core, raising the productivity of every engineer around you. You'll bring clarity where there is uncertainty, raise the bar for engineering excellence through hands-on leadership, and shape how Dropbox thinks about performance for years to come. In return, you'll gain meaningful exposure to senior leadership, build foundational systems that unlock future product capabilities, and grow into an org-level technical strategist — helping advance Dropbox's mission to create a more enlightened way of working. Our Engineering Career Framework is viewable by anyone outside the company and describes what’s expected for our engineers at each of our career levels. Check out our blog post on this topic and more here. Responsibilities - Drive performance improvement on the Dropbox web application as the first focus of the role — profiling React surfaces, producing flame graphs and heat maps, identifying the highest-impact opportunities, and shipping measurable improvements - Lead the performance initiative across iOS, Android, and desktop by coordinating with internal platform experts who own those clients — setting strategy, defining measurement standards, and driving execution rather than implementing every fix personally - Take performance improvements end-to-end: from measurement, to root-cause analysis, to shipped code changes, to validation in production telemetry - Build and own the measurement, instrumentation, and regression-detection systems that engineering teams across Core depend on to ship performant code - Write production code regularly — primarily JavaScript and React on the web, with backend work in Python and Go on the services those surfaces depend on - Set engineering standards for performance work across Core Engineering, and mentor IC3 and IC4 engineers on profiling, measurement methodology, and performance-aware system design - Apply AI tooling to performance work and lead the optimization of AI-assisted engineering workflows across Core, raising engineering throughput and shaping how Dropbox engineers use AI to ship better software faster - Influence cross-org roadmaps and architectural decisions, partnering with engineering leaders, PMs, and designers to ensure performance is treated as a first-class product attribute Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours. If a team has an on-call rotation, all engineers on the team are expected to participate in the rotation as part of their employment. Applicants are encouraged to ask for more details of the rotations to which the applicant is applying. Requirements - BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics) or equivalent technical experience - Minimum of 12 years of experience as a software engineer with 3+ years serving as a Senior. - Demonstrated, hands-on experience driving measurable performance improvements in production web applications — including profiling JavaScript and React surfaces, identifying root causes through flame graphs, heat maps, traces, and RUM data, and shipping the fixes that moved the metric - Demonstrated experience using AI tooling to accelerate performance work — applying LLMs and AI-assisted workflows to profiling analysis, root-cause investigation, refactoring, or shipping performance fixes - Experience optimizing AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve the productivity of other engineers — selecting tools, defining patterns and guardrails, and measuring the impact on engineering throughput - Production experience with modern backend services in Python or Go that support consumer-facing client surfaces - Experience leading technical strategy on cross-cutting initiatives spanning multiple teams or surfaces, including writing design docs, defining architecture, and driving execution to measurable outcomes - Has worked on a consumer user-facing product (versus a platform team or developer-facing API-based product), and shipped changes that moved customer-visible metrics - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of influencing roadmaps and decisions outside their direct reporting line — including leading initiatives that depend on coordinating with platform owners they don't directly manage Preferred Qualifications - Experience profiling and improving native iOS applications (Swift), including startup time, scroll performance, and memory behavior - Experience profiling and improving native Android applications (Kotlin), including startup time, scroll performance, and memory behavior - Experience profiling and improving desktop client applications, including startup, IPC, and resource usage - Experience building or owning performance regression-detection systems integrated into CI/CD - Experience with RUM telemetry pipelines, sampling strategy, and statistically rigorous comparison of performance data - Track record of mentoring senior engineers (Senior and above) and raising the technical bar across an engineering organization CompensationCanada Pay Range $204,900—$277,200 CAD

• Own the strategic vision and performance metrics for both direct field pipeline and indirect partner-led business globally. • Lead the Integrated Marketing team to design and deploy highly optimized mid- and bottom-funnel acquisition campaigns that move prospects effectively through the sales pipeline. • Oversee the upstream Campaigns team to deliver compelling content frameworks and high-impact customer marketing initiatives that drive post-sale engagement, adoption, brand advocacy, and net revenue retention (NRR). • Develop and execute high-impact joint marketing programs with strategic AI and productivity ecosystem partners. • Oversee marketing strategies to and through Dropbox’s distribution networks and cloud marketplaces to support our incremental channel revenue stream. • Build, scale, and institutionalize Dropbox’s ABM framework. Define account selection, tiering, multi-channel orchestration, and tailored campaigns for high-value corporate and mid-market accounts.

• Own and advance CorpFleet’s Windows endpoint platform, including policy, management, reliability, and operational quality. • Maintain and improve Windows endpoint management workflows, including Intune-related administration and device lifecycle processes. • Drive security and compliance-related platform work, including application controls, privileged-access-related workflows, secrets-handling patterns, and endpoint visibility. • Partner with CorpInfra, IAM, Security, Corp IT, and support teams on rollout planning, escalation paths, access dependencies, and ownership boundaries. • Improve operational scalability through automation, documentation, runbooks, and better platform management practices. • Lead cross-functional, multi-phase platform initiatives and make sound tradeoff decisions across reliability, security, employee experience, and team capacity. • Mentor teammates and raise the bar on technical judgment, documentation quality, and operational execution.

• Own and advance CorpFleet’s Windows endpoint platform, including policy, management, reliability, and operational quality. • Maintain and improve Windows endpoint management workflows, including Intune-related administration and device lifecycle processes. • Drive security and compliance-related platform work, including application controls, privileged-access-related workflows, secrets-handling patterns, and endpoint visibility. • Partner with CorpInfra, IAM, Security, Corp IT, and support teams on rollout planning, escalation paths, access dependencies, and ownership boundaries. • Improve operational scalability through automation, documentation, runbooks, and better platform management practices. • Lead cross-functional, multi-phase platform initiatives and make sound tradeoff decisions across reliability, security, employee experience, and team capacity. • Mentor teammates and raise the bar on technical judgment, documentation quality, and operational execution.

• Support the migration of existing products to a modern updater platform that leverages the latest updater technologies and tooling, ensuring a smooth transition from legacy systems. • Drive the adoption of efficient, scalable, and maintainable update and installation workflows to improve release reliability and operational efficiency. • Partner closely with product and engineering teams to support the build, packaging, and release of new applications. • Provide guidance on release readiness and best practices, and assist with troubleshooting build and deployment issues. • Ensure releases meet established quality, reliability, and customer experience standards. • Enable seamless transitions from development to customer availability, contributing to faster time to market and improved product delivery.

• Define and drive the vision for Dropbox’s next generation design system, expanding it from a component library into a broader product experience platform for patterns, primitives, standards, and shared product logic. • Lead Design Systems and Design Technology as a center of excellence for front end product quality, interaction patterns, accessibility, implementation standards, and cross product experience coherence. • Build and evolve reusable product patterns that drive core Dropbox experiences, including navigation, creation flows, sharing, permissions, collaboration, onboarding, search, content activation, notifications, settings, admin workflows, and AI assisted experiences. • Move the team from reactive patternization to proactive product leadership, helping identify horizontal product needs early and shaping solutions that can scale across multiple Dropbox surfaces and teams. • Own the full lifecycle of shared patterns and components, including discovery, definition, design, prototyping, engineering partnership, adoption, measurement, maintenance, governance, and deprecation. • Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Brand, Marketing, and Design leadership to align on the highest impact horizontal opportunities and ensure shared systems directly support product strategy. • Raise the craft and quality bar across Dropbox by improving interaction design, visual quality, information architecture, accessibility, motion, content patterns, implementation fidelity, and front end consistency. • Create an operating model that makes adoption desirable rather than mandated, ensuring product teams see the system as a way to move faster, build better, and reduce duplicated effort. • Lead and develop a team of designers, design technologists, and systems specialists, creating clear ownership, strong critique practices, high standards, and a culture of pragmatic systems thinking. • Partner with engineering leadership to improve the relationship between design systems, code, product infrastructure, and front end delivery, ensuring that design intent is translated into high quality implementation. • Establish durable governance, measurement, and contribution models that help the system evolve continuously while maintaining quality, coherence, and accountability. • Help Dropbox prepare for AI native product experiences by defining systems that can encode design knowledge, guide product decisions, and support more adaptive, contextual, and intelligent experiences over time.

• Define and drive the vision for Dropbox’s next generation design system. • Lead Design Systems and Design Technology as a center of excellence. • Build and evolve reusable product patterns that drive core Dropbox experiences. • Move the team from reactive patternization to proactive product leadership. • Own the full lifecycle of shared patterns and components. • Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Brand, and Marketing leadership. • Raise the craft and quality bar across Dropbox's product offerings. • Create an operating model for product teams to make adoption desirable. • Lead and develop a team of designers, design technologists, and systems specialists. • Partner with engineering leadership to improve the relationship between design systems and implementation standards. • Establish durable governance and contribution models for system evolution. • Help Dropbox prepare for AI native product experiences.

• Strategically maintain sensitive information and complex calendars in a rapidly changing environment • Partner with other admins and senior leaders to align calendar availability • Plan and execute on-site and off-site meetings, dinners, and events • Arrange domestic and international travel arrangements • Prepare monthly expense reports, and coordinate other documentation, where needed • Coordinate special projects as needed • Serve as the face of Dropbox on behalf of your lead and act as a liaison • Partner with the admin community to ensure necessary coverage for full leadership team.

• Strategically maintain sensitive information and complex calendars in a rapidly changing environment, requiring coordination with both internal and external executives and assistants • Partner with other admins and senior leaders to align calendar availability and ensure the Executive is available for any necessary meetings, while balancing managerial and personal demands. • Plan and execute on-site and off-site meetings, dinners, and events, including for Executive with customers • Arrange domestic and international travel arrangements • Prepare monthly expense reports, and coordinate other documentation, where needed • Coordinate special projects as needed • Serve as the face of Dropbox on behalf of your lead and act as a liaison, building great relationships with internal stakeholders and external contacts • Partner with the admin community to ensure necessary coverage for full leadership team and set operating standards for the organization

• Define and drive the design vision for Dropbox’s broader multi-product ecosystem that helps customers find, understand, activate, and act on the content already living in Dropbox. • Design AI-powered experiences that make customers sharper and more effective without replacing their judgment. Ensure AI feels like a trusted partner: reducing friction, surfacing what matters, accelerating decisions, and keeping customers in control. • Lead ambiguous, high-impact product areas from strategic framing through execution, translating emerging AI capabilities into simple, elegant, high-trust experiences that feel powerful without becoming clunky, noisy, or difficult to use. • Set an exceptionally high craft bar across interaction design, information architecture, systems thinking, prototyping, content, visual quality, and implementation. Make the product feel precise, coherent, and unmistakably Dropbox. • Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, and Design leadership to shape strategy, prioritize the highest-impact opportunities, align teams, and drive outcomes with urgency and quality. • Raise the bar for the design organization by mentoring designers, improving critique, modeling excellent AI product design, and helping the team become more AI-enabled in how they explore, prototype, evaluate, and ship work.