Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata
Dropbox
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Remote • 🇺🇸 United States
Visit company websiteSalary
💰 $240,600 - $325,500 per year
Job Level
Lead
Tech Stack
CloudDistributed SystemsGoJavaPythonRust
About the role
- Design and operate Dropbox’s core metadata infrastructure — distributed, transactional systems that serve as the foundation for nearly all products and internal engineering workflows
- Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Dropbox’s metadata database stacks, including storage engines, distributed consensus, caching layers, and access APIs
- Lead architecture and implementation efforts that evolve how transactional metadata is modeled, stored, and accessed across Dropbox’s global infrastructure
- Identify and solve high-impact, deeply technical problems involving scale, availability, consistency, and latency — navigating ambiguity with strong system-level thinking
- Drive cross-functional technical alignment by partnering with platform, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure metadata systems meet the needs of the business and other engineers
- Serve as a technical leader and role model, mentoring engineers, shaping engineering culture, and contributing to Dropbox’s high hiring bar through recruiting and interviews
- Advance operational excellence by building resilient systems, participating in the on-call rotation, and continuously improving reliability through thoughtful design and rigorous post-incident analysis.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and integrate industry best practices that enable Dropbox to stay ahead in scale, performance, and developer productivity
Requirements
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
- 10+ years of advanced software development skills in at least two modern programming languages (e.g., Go, C++, Java, Rust, Python, etc), with the ability to learn and work across multiple stacks
- Deep expertise in distributed systems design and operation, including mastery of principles like consistency models, consensus protocols, partitioning, replication, and latency tradeoffs
- Experience operating large-scale, transactional database systems in production — particularly as the source of truth in a high-availability, multi-tenant infrastructure environment
- Demonstrated project leadership skills, including technical design, work breakdown, multi-workstream coordination, estimation, and milestone planning for high-impact infrastructure
- Strong debugging and incident response skills, including hands-on experience in on-call rotations and post-incident analysis for critical infrastructure
- Excellent communication and collaboration abilities, including cross-functional influence, mentoring, and the ability to articulate complex system tradeoffs to varied audiences
- Proven experience operating and maintaining large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments, supporting high-throughput workloads (e.g., systems serving 10M+ QPS or equivalent read/write intensity).
Benefits
- Health insurance
- 401(k) matching
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
GoC++JavaRustPythondistributed systems designtransactional database systemsdebuggingincident responsecloud environments
Soft skills
project leadershipcommunicationcollaborationmentoringcross-functional influencesystem-level thinkingproblem-solvingtechnical designwork breakdownmilestone planning
Certifications
BS in Computer ScienceMS in Computer SciencePhD in Computer Science