Dropbox is looking to evolve its transactional database systems that underpin nearly every Dropbox product, focusing on global scale, reliability, and scalability challenges for metadata infrastructure.
Requirements
- 10+ years of advanced software development skills in at least two modern programming languages (e.g., Go, C++, Java, Rust, Python, etc), with the ability to learn and work across multiple stacks
- Deep expertise in distributed systems design and operation, including mastery of principles like consistency models, consensus protocols, partitioning, replication, and latency tradeoffs
- Experience operating large-scale, transactional database systems in production — particularly as the source of truth in a high-availability, multi-tenant infrastructure environment
- Strong debugging and incident response skills, including hands-on experience in on-call rotations and post-incident analysis for critical infrastructure
- Proven experience operating and maintaining large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments, supporting high-throughput workloads (e.g., systems serving 10M+ QPS or equivalent read/write intensity).
- Experience building or scaling metadata systems, distributed databases, or data-access platforms (e.g., RocksDB, Cassandra, CockroachDB, Spanner, MySQL, or similar)
- Deep understanding and real world experience with consensus protocols and coordination systems such as Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, or etcd
Responsibilities
- Design and operate Dropbox’s core metadata infrastructure — distributed, transactional systems that serve as the foundation for nearly all products and internal engineering workflows
- Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Dropbox’s metadata database stacks, including storage engines, distributed consensus, caching layers, and access APIs
- Lead architecture and implementation efforts that evolve how transactional metadata is modeled, stored, and accessed across Dropbox’s global infrastructure
- Identify and solve high-impact, deeply technical problems involving scale, availability, consistency, and latency — navigating ambiguity with strong system-level thinking
- Drive cross-functional technical alignment by partnering with platform, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure metadata systems meet the needs of the business and other engineers
- Serve as a technical leader and role model, mentoring engineers, shaping engineering culture, and contributing to Dropbox’s high hiring bar through recruiting and interviews
- Advance operational excellence by building resilient systems, participating in the on-call rotation, and continuously improving reliability through thoughtful design and rigorous post-incident analysis.
Other
- Serve as a technical leader and role model, mentoring engineers, shaping engineering culture, and contributing to Dropbox’s high hiring bar through recruiting and interviews
- Excellent communication and collaboration abilities, including cross-functional influence, mentoring, and the ability to articulate complex system tradeoffs to varied audiences
- Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours.
- Demonstrated project leadership skills, including technical design, work breakdown, multi-workstream coordination, estimation, and milestone planning for high-impact infrastructure
