Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer focused on the Metadata Infrastructure organization, you will play a central role in shaping and evolving the transactional database systems that underpin nearly every Dropbox product. The Metadata Core and Metadata Services teams together operate foundational systems that manage Dropbox's transactional metadata at global scale, powering workloads across storage, sync, sharing, AI, and collaboration features. You'll be responsible for defining and executing the multi-year technical strategy for this critical infrastructure - spanning distributed consensus, replication, caching layers, and high-performance storage engines - while staying deeply engaged in solving today's real-world reliability and scalability challenges. Your work will have broad, company-wide impact, driving architectural alignment, enabling new product capabilities, and directly improving the productivity of engineering teams across Dropbox. This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, enjoy deep technical problem solving, and want to lead through influence while building resilient, developer-focused infrastructure. By joining this team, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of metadata systems at Dropbox, gain exposure to senior leadership, and help set the technical culture for some of the most business-critical systems in the company.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours. If a team has an on-call rotation, all engineers on the team are expected to participate in the rotation as part of their employment. Applicants are encouraged to ask for more details of the rotations to which the applicant is applying.
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).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling metadata systems, distributed databases, or data-access platforms (e.g., RocksDB, Cassandra, CockroachDB, Spanner, MySQL, or similar)
• Deep understanding and real world experience with consensus protocols and coordination systems such as Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, or etcd
• Experience designing and optimizing cache coherence, read/write paths, or consistency layers at the storage or service tier
• Contributions to developer productivity or self-service tooling in large-scale infrastructure organizations
• Strong technical mentorship or leadership experience, especially in influencing org-wide engineering direction and up-leveling peers
• Demonstrated experience in designing, implementing, and managing Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies and solutions.

Compensation

US Zone 1

$248,200-$335,800 USD

US Zone 2

$223,400-$302,200 USD

US Zone 3

$198,600-$268,600 USD