Infrastructure Software Engineer, Dropbox
Metadata
$157.8-240.1k
Actual salary range is dependent on location. All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
More information about location
Smart workspace company
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Smart workspace company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$157.8-240.1k
Actual salary range is dependent on location. All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Dropbox's mission is to design a more enlightened way of working.
Role
Who you are
- 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
Desirable
- Experience building distributed databases or storage systems
- Practical experience with and deep understanding of data structures used in storage systems (e.g. LSM trees, B-trees, Hash Indexes)
- Experience operating database systems (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra)
- Experience with distributed caching, either custom built or operating open source options such as Memcached or Redis
- Experience improving reliability and performance in high-scale data systems
- Experience working with cross-functional teams to understand their current use cases, identify future needs and requirements, and incorporate them into the team’s roadmap
- Interest in deepening distributed systems expertise and expanding technical leadership
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
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
(CTO)Studied Computer Science at MIT before founding Dropbox straight out of university
Drew Houston
(CEO)Studied Computer Science at MIT before founding Dropbox straight out of university
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