USD per year
Staff Backend Product Software Engineer, Core Intelligence & Media
Role Description
As a Staff Engineer at Dropbox, you’ll take on some of the company’s most complex and ambiguous challenges, operating at the intersection of technology, product, and business impact. You’ll help define technical direction for customer-facing experiences used by millions, turning evolving context into clear, durable roadmaps that shape how Dropbox builds and scales. Your influence will extend beyond any single team, driving architectural decisions, execution quality, and cross-org alignment. You’ll bring clarity where there is uncertainty and raise the bar for engineering excellence through hands-on leadership and thoughtful collaboration. In return, you’ll gain meaningful exposure to senior leadership, shape 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
- Lead the technical delivery of a team of 15 to 20 engineers to deliver high-impact customer and business outcomes.
- Shape technical direction and partner with Product Management as the DRI for critical company-wide objectives.
- Own massive, ambiguous technical and product problems that create company-wide opportunity.
- Be a prolific hands-on coder who owns and implements the most critical, complex, and foundational components of the system.
- Influence roadmaps across orgs breaking silos and steering decisions that change how Dropbox builds.
- Architect foundational systems that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.
- Demonstrate senior technical leadership and maintain high engineering standards in a virtual-first environment.
Requirements
- BS, MS or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics) or equivalent technical experience.
- 12+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- Must have worked in a consumer user-facing team (versus a platform team, a developer-facing API-based product etc).
- Must have a strong mix of skills and depth across multiple areas including expertise in three or more of search, media systems engineering, performance engineering, modern ML and LLM-based APIs and agentic frameworks.
Preferred Qualifications
- Has significant experience in use of AI tools for technical design as well as coding for production use cases.
Compensation
US Zone 1 $248‚200—$335‚800 USD US Zone 2 $223‚400—$302‚200 USD US Zone 3 $198‚600—$268‚600 USD The range(s) listed above is the expected annual salary/OTE (On-Target Earnings) for this role subject to change. Please note OTE are for sales roles only. Salary/OTE is just one component of Dropbox’s total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program or a sales incentive (target included in OTE) as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Dropbox takes a number of factors into account when determining individual starting pay including job and level they are hired into location/metropolitan area skillset peer compensation. We target most new hire offers between the minimum up to the middle of the range. Dropbox uses the zip code of an employee’s remote work location to determine which metropolitan pay range we use. Current US Zone locations are as follows:
- US Zone 1: San Francisco metro New York City metro or Seattle metro
- US Zone 2: California (outside SF metro) Colorado Connecticut (outside NYC metro) Delaware Illinois (Chicago metro) Indiana (Chicago metro) Maryland Massachusetts Michigan (Chicago metro) New Hampshire New Jersey (outside NYC metro) New York (outside NYC metro) Oregon Pennsylvania (D.C. metro) Pennsylvania (outside NYC metro) Texas (Austin metro) Virginia (DC metro) Washington (outside Seattle metro) Washington DC metro West Virginia (DC metro) Wisconsin (Chicago metro)
- US Zone 3: All other US locations
Dropbox is a Virtual First company and is open to hiring candidates in all authorized locations.
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Company Description
Dropbox isn’t just a workplace—it’s a living lab for designing a more enlightened way of working. We’re a global community of bold visionaries and resourceful doers shaping the future of Dropbox and in turn the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the autonomy of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection creating space for meaningful work and lasting relationships With a startup mindset and enterprise-level opportunities we expect Dropbox employees to think critically stay curious their impact helping make work more intuitive enjoyable,and human for themselves hundreds millions people worldwide.If you’re ready push boundaries challenge yourself DropBox ready you.
Dropbox helps find, organize, and protect work with products like Dropbox Dash, offering advanced search for video, images, and team members plus generative AI capabilities. It provides cloud storage, secure file sharing, collaboration tools, and industry-specific solutions for construction, media, technology, professional services, manufacturing, and education. Security features include encryption, tamper-proof documents, version history, and recovery.
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