- Data Quality & Observability: Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics.
- Self-Serve Platform: Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy.
- Cost & Efficiency: Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner deeply with Data Science, BIE, Analytics, Product, Data Platform, and the CTO org to define the semantic layer, modeling standards, and data contracts that make downstream work trustworthy and fast.
- Engineering Culture: Establish rigorous engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD for data, incident response, and postmortems — and champion the effective, measured use of AI coding tools to improve engineering productivity.
- Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
- 8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience with increasing scope, ideally in high-scale environments.
- 3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team design.
- Deep Technical Expertise: Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration) on a modern lakehouse or warehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).
- Reliability & Quality: Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines.
- Systems & Modeling: Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers.
- Stakeholder Management: Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals.
- Platform / Self-Serve Experience: Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy.
- AI-Forward Engineering: Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails.
- Cost Discipline: Demonstrated success improving compute/storage unit economics without regressing reliability.
- Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices.
- Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners.
AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
- Awareness: Understand yourself and others.
- Judgment: Evaluate information and make decisions in complex situations.
- Adaptability: Learn, adjust, and stay effective through change.
- Connection: Communicate, collaborate, and build trust.
To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.
CompensationUS Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
Skills Required
- 8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience in high-scale environments.
- 3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
- Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration).
- Experience with modern lakehouse or warehouse stacks (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).
- Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines.
- Strong data modeling fundamentals and ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts for downstream consumers.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners.
- Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy.
- Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into engineering workflows with appropriate guardrails.
- Demonstrated success improving compute and storage unit economics without regressing reliability.
- Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices.
- Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners.
- Durable skills: awareness, judgment, adaptability, and strong connection/communication abilities.
What the Team is Saying
Dropbox Compensation & Benefits Highlights
How does Dropbox 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.
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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.
