Senior Manager of Data Engineering, Dropbox
$180.2-274.3k
Salary dependent on candidates location
Smart workspace company
Open for applications
Smart workspace company
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$180.2-274.3k
Salary dependent on candidates location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Dropbox's mission is to design a more enlightened way of working.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience with increasing scope, ideally in high-scale environments
- 3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team design
- Deep Technical Expertise: Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration) on a modern lakehouse or warehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery)
- Reliability & Quality: Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines
- Systems & Modeling: Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers
- Stakeholder Management: Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals
Desirable
- Platform / Self-Serve Experience: Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy
- AI-Forward Engineering: Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails
- Cost Discipline: Demonstrated success improving compute/storage unit economics without regressing reliability
- Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices
- Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners
What the job involves
- Data Quality & Observability: Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics
- Self-Serve Platform: Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy
- Cost & Efficiency: Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner deeply with Data Science, BIE, Analytics, Product, Data Platform, and the CTO org to define the semantic layer, modeling standards, and data contracts that make downstream work trustworthy and fast
- Engineering Culture: Establish rigorous engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD for data, incident response, and postmortems — and champion the effective, measured use of AI coding tools to improve engineering productivity
- Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning
Our take
Dropbox started by helping people bring together their files in one central place. The contents of these folders are synchronised to Dropbox's servers along with other computers and devices where the user has installed Dropbox, keeping the same files up-to-date across all devices.
Nowadays, there are lots of competing companies in cloud storage, and some with better distribution (e.g. Google and Apple). This explains why Dropbox is making a big push to reinvent itself after a fairly disappointing run since its IPO in 2018. The new Dropbox turns folders into "Spaces", which are collaboration hubs for teams, complete with comment streams, artificial intelligence tools and integrations into services such as Slack.
The company continues to build out its offerings through acquisitions, such as that of Formswift, bolstering its end-to-end agreement workflow capabilities. Indeed, It's very clear that Dropbox is trying to make a big move from being just a storage company. This seems to be a necessary move given the competitive nature of the industry it is operating within.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jan 2014
$350m
SERIES C
Oct 2011
$250m
SERIES B
Total funding: $607.4m
Company benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- We offer a generous company contribution toward individual medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage, including contributions toward dependent premiums
- Keep sharing and collaborating with friends and family even when you’re not at work with free Dropbox space for your whole crew
- Take the vacation you’ve always dreamed of with up to four consecutive weeks of paid time off
- Celebrate common holidays without your paycheck taking the hit with 11 company paid holidays
- Each Dropboxer has access to 32 hours of paid volunteer time off each year that they can use to support the causes close to their hearts
- We regularly offer panels and seminars featuring the best minds in tech, talent, diversity, and beyond that any Dropboxer can attend from the comfort of their home
- No two Dropboxers are the same, and their benefits shouldn’t be either. Our Perks allowance empowers employees to customize their benefits in line with what really matters to them
- Start building a successful 401K retirement plan with our dollar for dollar contribution match, up to $1,500 per quarter to a maximum of $6,000 per calendar year
Company HQ
Mission Bay, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Arash Ferdowsi
(Co-Founder)Studied Computer Science at MIT before founding Dropbox straight out of university
Drew Houston
(Co-Founder & CEO)Studied Computer Science at MIT before founding Dropbox straight out of university
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