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, prototyping, as well as coding for production use cases. CompensationUS Zone 1$248,200—$335,800 USDUS Zone 2$223,400—$302,200 USDUS Zone 3$198,600—$268,600 USD

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. Dropbox is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and has offices around the world.