- Technical leadership and architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
- Modernization and platform evolution: Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
- Identity and access systems: Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
- Engagement and insights foundations: Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
- Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
- Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
- Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
- Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements.
- Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, experimentation platforms, or engagement systems.
- Track record of driving modernization efforts in complex environments (e.g., migrating legacy systems, improving data quality and observability, simplifying architecture).
- Excellent technical judgment and ability to balance speed, stability, and long-term maintainability.
- Strong communication skills: able to write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and lead technical decision-making across teams.
- Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms (SSO, session management, risk signals, account security, privacy controls).
- Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure, especially data pipelines, engagement signals, retrieval/search systems, and feedback loops.
- Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements.
- Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy (beyond a single team), including mentorship of other tech leads and principals.
US Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
Skills Required
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- Significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems
- Strong expertise in at least two areas: identity/authn/authz, API design, analytics infrastructure
- Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems
- Strong communication skills
What the Team is Saying
Dropbox Compensation & Benefits Highlights
How does [COMPANY_NAME] ensure its pay and bonus plans are competitive?
Dropbox ensures base pay and bonuses are competitive by benchmarking pay using formal compensation surveys to create salary ranges and bonus targets, and conducting twice-yearly reviews aligned with performance.
Employees describe pay and bonuses as competitive and performance-driven.
Dropbox Insights
What We Do
We're a global community of bold visionaries and resourceful doers who are shaping the future of Dropbox—and with it the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the flexibility of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection, making space for both meaningful work and meaningful relationships. With our start-up mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, you can be who you are and grow into who you’re meant to be. Here, you can own your impact to make work more intuitive, joyful, and human—for you as a Dropboxer and for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If you're ready to push boundaries—and yourself—Dropbox is ready for you.
Why Work With Us
We believe people do their best work when empowered with autonomy and harmony, and we understand there’s no substitute for human connection. Our Virtual First model combines the flexibility of remote work with the power of in-person collaboration to create the best of both worlds: a distributed workplace, anchored in community.
Gallery
Dropbox Offices
Remote Workspace
Employees work remotely.
While remote work is the primary experience for our employees, we also prioritize opportunities for quarterly in-person collaboration knowing that connection is vital to a thriving workforce. We focus on how we work, not where we work.
