Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Dropbox
Production Engineering
$198.6-302.2k
Salary dependent on location + Stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units
More information about location
Smart workspace company
Be an early applicant
Smart workspace company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$198.6-302.2k
Salary dependent on location + Stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Dropbox's mission is to design a more enlightened way of working.
Role
Who you are
- BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related technical roles
- Proven ability to define and deliver multi-year, multi-team reliability, infrastructure, or platform strategies with measurable business and customer impact
- Deep experience with distributed systems, production operations, observability, incident response, SLOs/SLAs, debugging, and reliability risk management
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex technical problems, debug production systems, automate operational workflows, and design resilient software components
- Experience influencing engineering roadmaps across multiple teams and making technical decisions that optimize for the broader engineering organization
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align cross-functional stakeholders through ambiguity and drive execution across teams
Desirable
- Experience adapting reliability strategies, developer tooling, or operational processes for AI-assisted software development workflows
- Experience building or scaling observability, debugging, incident management, or developer productivity platforms for large engineering organizations
- Experience leading reliability improvements in environments with high deployment velocity, complex service dependencies, and large-scale production systems
- Track record of mentoring senior engineers, setting technical standards, and spreading reliability best practices through documentation, reviews, talks, or architecture guidance
- Familiarity with AI-enabled tooling, agentic development workflows, or operational risks introduced by rapid automation in the software development lifecycle
What the job involves
- As a Site Reliability Engineer focused on company-wide reliability strategy, you will play a crucial role in advancing Dropbox’s stability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence as AI technologies reshape how software is built and operated
- You will help define the reliability strategy for a new chapter of agentic development and AI-enabled software delivery, including preparing Dropbox for increases in pull request volume, service complexity, incident patterns, and demand for debugging and monitoring tools
- You will partner across Engineering, Product, and leadership teams to raise the bar for reliability, guide long-term platform investments, and ensure Dropbox continues to deliver dependable experiences for millions of users
- 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
- Define and evolve Dropbox’s company-wide technical reliability strategy to support the changing engineering environment created by AI-assisted and agentic software development
- Set multi-year reliability goals, standards, and roadmaps across observability, debugging, incident management, service health, and operational readiness
- Lead cross-team initiatives that reduce reliability risk as software delivery velocity, pull request volume, service complexity, and incident volume increase
- Partner with engineering leaders and platform teams to improve monitoring, alerting, debugging, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response systems at company scale
- Identify emerging reliability risks introduced by AI-enabled development workflows and design scalable systems, processes, and guardrails to mitigate them
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across teams, raising engineering quality, reliability judgment, and operational excellence
- Drive clear communication and alignment with senior stakeholders on reliability priorities, tradeoffs, risks, and execution progress
- 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
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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