• Define and execute the engineering vision and multi-year technical roadmap aligned with company strategy • Own delivery across customer-facing and back-end domains including e-commerce, Order-to-Cash (OTC), fulfillment center technology (e.g., WMS), and enterprise integrations • Lead globally distributed teams while maintaining strong alignment, execution discipline, and cultural cohesion • Balance speed, quality, reliability, and cost at scale • Establish clear architectural direction while empowering teams to make strong local decisions • Build, scale, and retain high-performing engineering teams through strong leadership, coaching, and career development • Ensure predictable delivery through disciplined planning, prioritization, and execution across multiple time zones and regions • Guide platform architecture across distributed systems, APIs, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations • Partner closely with Product Management to align engineering investment with customer and business priorities

• Lead the delivery of critical security initiatives, ensuring team-level dependencies are met and our infrastructure remains resilient against evolving threats • Own and drive the security roadmap associated with at least one Engineering Objective and Key Result (EOKR) annually • Create and maintain Technical Roadmaps (TTSRs) for the security domain • Proactively oversee technical execution across the engineering organization • Design and implement scalable security systems • Scale the security organization by improving technical interview loops and training engineers • Manage and resolve complex, cross-organizational security issues

• Online: COBOL, CICS • Batch: JCL, COBOL (batch), SORT • ROSCOE • TSO/ISPF • Database: DB2 (developer perspective) • Participation in projects using Agile methodology • AI copilots (code generation and testing) • RESTful APIs • Sequential files / VSAM datasets • KDZ/RDZ (automated testing)

Role DescriptionAs a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, you will own company critical, loosely defined technical problems with multi year impact, operating at the intersection of technology, product, business strategy, and applied AI. You will define long term technical direction for customer facing experiences used by millions, identifying where AI meaningfully improves customer value and translating evolving business context and industry advances into durable, multi area strategies and roadmaps that shape how Dropbox builds, scales, and innovates, while remaining hands on in software development where it provides the greatest leverage. Your influence will span organizations, setting foundational architecture, driving execution standards, and aligning senior technical and product leaders across boundaries. You will lead the responsible introduction and adoption of AI across product capabilities and engineering workflows, bring clarity to the most complex decisions, institutionalize engineering excellence, and contribute directly through critical design, prototyping, and code reviews. In return, you will operate as a trusted technical partner to senior leadership, shape systems and platforms including AI powered foundations that define Dropbox’s future, and act as a company level technical strategist, advancing 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 - Own and drive technical outcomes across multiple teams and organizations, delivering company critical customer and business impact at scale. - Define long term technical strategy and partner with senior Product and Engineering leaders as the technical owner for the most important company objectives. - Tackle the most ambiguous and far reaching technical and product problems, shaping what the company builds as much as how it builds it. - Remain deeply hands on in software development, owning and implementing the most critical, complex, and foundational parts of the system where leverage is highest. - Influence and align roadmaps across organizations, resolving structural bottlenecks and changing how Dropbox builds and operates. - Architect and evolve foundational systems (this involves both frontend and backend systems) and platforms that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users. - Model exceptional technical judgment and execution rigor, setting and sustaining high engineering standards across a distributed, virtual environment - Drive AI adoption both to increase productivity and to produce AI based features. Requirements - Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving substantial software development, or equivalent industry experience demonstrating deep technical mastery. - 15+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving large scale software systems with sustained impact across multiple teams or organizations. - Demonstrated success operating at a Principal level, owning company critical technical problems and influencing long term technical direction. - Strong experience building consumer facing products at scale, with a deep understanding of user experience, performance, reliability, and operational excellence. - Broad and deep technical expertise across multiple domains, including several of frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage systems, concurrency, and distributed systems. - Practical experience applying modern ML, LLM based APIs, and agentic frameworks in production systems, with sound judgment around quality, cost, and risk. - Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively to senior engineering, product, and executive audiences. Preferred Qualifications - Experience defining and scaling company wide platforms or architectural standards that are adopted across multiple organizations. - Proven track record of leading the introduction of new technologies such as AI or ML into core products or engineering workflows with durable impact. - Experience operating in highly distributed, virtual first engineering organizations at global scale. CompensationUS Zone 1 This role is not available in Zone 1 US Zone 2 $256,300—$346,700 USD US Zone 3 $227,800—$308,200 USD