Principal Software Engineer, Core Sharing & Collaboration

About This Role

As a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, you will own company-critical, loosely defined technical problems with multi-year impact, operating at the intersection of technology, product, and business strategy. You will define long-term technical direction for customer-facing experiences used by millions, identifying where AI meaningfully improves customer value and translating evolving business context and industry advances into durable multi-area strategies and roadmaps. Your influence will span organizations, setting foundational architecture, driving execution standards, and aligning senior technical and product leaders across boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical outcomes across multiple teams and organizations, delivering company critical customer and business impact at scale.
• Define long-term technical strategy and partner with senior Product and Engineering leaders as the technical owner for the most important company objectives.
• Tackle the most ambiguous and far-reaching technical and product problems, shaping what the company builds as much as how it builds it.
• Remain deeply hands-on in software development, owning and implementing the most critical, complex, and foundational parts of the system where leverage is highest.
• Influence and align roadmaps across organizations, resolving structural bottlenecks and changing how Dropbox builds and operates.
• Architect and evolve foundational systems (both frontend and backend) and platforms that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.
• Model exceptional technical judgment and execution rigor, setting and sustaining high engineering standards across a distributed, virtual environment.
• Drive AI adoption both to increase productivity and to produce AI-based features.

Requirements

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving substantial software development, or equivalent industry experience demonstrating deep technical mastery.
• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving large scale software systems with sustained impact across multiple teams or organizations.
• Demonstrated success operating at a Principal level, owning company critical technical problems and influencing long term technical direction.
• Strong experience building consumer facing products at scale, with a deep understanding of user experience, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Broad and deep technical expertise across multiple domains, including several of frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage systems, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Practical experience applying modern ML, LLM based APIs, and agentic frameworks in production systems, with sound judgment around quality, cost, and risk.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively to senior engineering, product, and executive audiences.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving substantial software development, or equivalent industry experience
• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving large scale software systems with sustained impact across multiple teams or organizations

Nice to Have

• Experience defining and scaling company wide platforms or architectural standards that are adopted across multiple organizations.
• Proven track record of leading the introduction of new technologies such as AI or ML into core products or engineering workflows with durable impact.
• Experience operating in highly distributed, virtual first engineering organizations at global scale.

Skills

* Required skills

Benefits