Dropbox

Principal Engineer, Identity & Engagement

Dropbox

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: United States

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Salary

💰 $227,800 - $308,200 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
  • Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
  • Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
  • Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
  • Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
  • Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
  • Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
  • Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.

Requirements

  • 10+ 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.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
software engineeringbackend systemsplatform systemsdistributed systemsAPI designanalytics infrastructuretelemetry infrastructureidentity managementauthenticationauthorization
Soft Skills
leadershipcommunicationtechnical judgmentmentoringproblem-solvingcollaborationalignmentinfluencedesign documentationstakeholder management