Job Specifications
Dropbox is a Virtual First company. For this role, we are currently only authorized to hire candidates from the following provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.
Company Description
Dropbox isn’t just a workplace—it’s a living lab for more enlightened ways of working. We're a global community of bold visionaries and resourceful doers who are shaping the future of Dropbox—and with it the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the autonomy of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection, making space for both meaningful work and meaningful relationships. With our start-up mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, you can be who you are and grow into who you’re meant to be. Here, you can own your impact to make work more intuitive, joyful, and human—for you as a Dropboxer and for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If you're ready to push boundaries—and yourself— Dropbox is ready for you.
Team Description
The Dropbox Engineering Team builds the technology that creates more enlightened ways of working for hundreds of millions of people. Every day, our platforms—including Dropbox Dash, Dropbox Sign, and our core sync engine—handle over a billion files for users worldwide, creating engineering challenges as great as the opportunity for impact. Our software engineering team uses a range of technologies to solve interesting problems, including Python, React, Node.js, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Android development. We think like a startup but build for an enterprise, exploring new possibilities that transform how people work. If you're excited about turning complex technical challenges into intuitive solutions at scale, join our Engineering team. Areas of work include Machine Learning Engineers, Infrastructure Engineer, Product SWE Frontend and Backend, Mobile Software Engineers (iOS and Android), Engineering Manager, Data Engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Security Engineering, Site Reliability Engineer, Technical Program Managers, Network Engineer, Datacenter Engineer, Technical Supply Chain Manager and more.
Role Description
As a Software Engineer on the Metadata team, you’ll build and operate the large-scale distributed databases that every Dropbox service depends on. Metadata systems are mission-critical, in the live path for all user operations and must meet stringent requirements for latency, durability, and transactional consistency.
You’ll design and evolve the core infrastructure that manages Dropbox’s databases at scale, enabling fast, reliable access to data for millions of users and hundreds of internal services. This work spans distributed systems, replication, caching, and transactional database systems.
You’ll collaborate closely with engineers across Infrastructure and Product teams to ensure the metadata layer meets business needs and continues to scale with Dropbox’s growth. This is an opportunity to leverage your expertise in distributed systems and grow into broader technical leadership.
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
Design and maintain distributed database systems providing low-latency, strongly consistent data access.
Implement and optimize replication, consensus, and caching mechanisms to meet availability and performance goals.
Operate production systems, including participating in the on-call rotation, ensuring high availability and data durability.
Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to assess current and future use cases and requirements, supporting the development of a mid- to long-term roadmap that reflects these needs.
Contribute to system design reviews, postmortems, and reliability improvements.
Write high-quality, efficient code in Go and Rust for performance-critical systems.
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
5+ years of experience designing and implementing software using distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency, partitioning, and fault tolerance.
Experience building databases, storage systems, or large scale data infrastructure.
Proficiency in Go, Rust, C++ or similar systems languages.
Familiarity with consensus and coordination systems (e.g. Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, etcd).
Experience operating production services and participating in on-call rotations.
Strong debugging and performance analysis skills.
Excellent collaboration and communication abilities across teams.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience buildin
About the Company
Dropbox is the one place to keep life organized and keep work moving. With more than 700 million registered users across 180 countries, we're on a mission to design a more enlightened way of working.
To learn more about working at Dropbox, visit jobs.dropbox.com
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