Principal Software Engineer, Core Sharing & Collaboration

About the role

You will own company critical, loosely defined technical problems with multi year impact, operating at the intersection of technology, product, business strategy, and applied AI. 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 that shape how Dropbox builds, scales, and innovates, while remaining hands on in software development where it provides the greatest leverage. Your influence will span organizations, setting foundational architecture, driving execution standards, and aligning senior technical and product leaders across boundaries. You will lead the responsible introduction and adoption of AI across product capabilities and engineering workflows, bring clarity to the most complex decisions, institutionalize engineering excellence, and contribute directly through critical design, prototyping, and code reviews. In return, you will operate as a trusted technical partner to senior leadership, shape systems and platforms including AI powered foundations that define Dropbox's future, and act as a company level technical strategist, advancing 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.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Drive end to end ownership of company critical initiatives, delivering complex customer and business outcomes across teams and systems.
• Define and evolve long term technical strategy, partnering with senior Product and Engineering leaders to set the vision for the most important company objectives.
• Tackle the most ambiguous and far reaching technical and product problems, shaping both what the company builds and 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 at scale.
• Architect and evolve foundational systems, including frontend and backend platforms, enabling new product capabilities and operating 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 across the organization, both to increase operational productivity and to deliver AI based features that create new customer value.
• Lead the responsible introduction and adoption of AI across product capabilities and engineering workflows, ensuring alignment with company principles and standards.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior leadership, providing clarity on complex decisions and representing technical feasibility and tradeoffs in strategic discussions.
• Instill and evangelize engineering excellence by mentoring senior engineers, improving processes, and elevating the quality of design, code, and reviews.
• Partner with cross functional stakeholders to translate business context and industry advances into durable strategies and multi year roadmaps.
• Break down complex problems into actionable workstreams, coordinating prioritization and execution across distributed teams.
• Contribute directly to critical design, prototyping, and code reviews, ensuring robust, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of delivering complex, high impact systems.
• 8+ years of hands on coding experience in modern backend and or frontend languages relevant to large scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to design and build systems that operate reliably at very large scale, serving hundreds of millions of users.
• Exceptional problem solving skills, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to make decisions in the absence of complete information.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience influencing without authority across global, cross functional teams.
• Proven experience collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define and deliver successful products.
• Deep understanding of software development practices, including testing, code review, and operational excellence in production environments.
• Commitment to responsible AI practices, including fairness, transparency, and ongoing evaluation of AI enabled features.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI platforms, tooling, and or production ML workflows.
• Background in systems requiring high security and compliance standards relevant to enterprise scale products.
• Experience contributing to open source projects at scale.
• Demonstrated leadership in driving cross organizational change and technical transformation.

Practical notes

This role may require travel to Dropbox offices for meetings and collaboration. Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada under the applicable program and comply with all Canadian work authorization requirements. If you need accommodations during the application process, please let us know.