Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata

Dropbox is a Virtual First company. For this role, we are hiring in Zones 2 and 3. Please refer to our Compensation section below to see what neighborhoods fall under each Zone.

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

This role is not available in Zone 1

US Zone 2

$216,500-$292,900 USD

US Zone 3

$192,400-$260,400 USD

The range(s) listed above is the expected annual salary/OTE (On-Target Earnings) for this role, subject to change.

Please note, OTE are for sales roles only.

Salary/OTE is just one component of Dropbox's total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program or a sales incentive (target included in OTE) as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Dropbox takes a number of factors into account when determining individual starting pay, including job and level they are hired into, location/metropolitan area, skillset, and peer compensation. We target most new hire offers between the minimum up to the middle of the range.

Dropbox uses the zip code of an employee's remote work location to determine which metropolitan pay range we use. Current US Zone locations are as follows:

US Zone 1: San Francisco metro, New York City metro, or Seattle metro
US Zone 2: Austin (TX) metro, Chicago metro, California (outside SF metro), Colorado, Connecticut (outside NYC metro), Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York (outside NYC metro), Oregon, Pennsylvania (outside NYC or DC metro), Washington DC metro, and West Virginia (DC metro)
US Zone 3: All other US locations

Company Description

Dropbox isn't just a workplace-it's a living lab for more enlightened ways of working. 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 autonomy 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.

Team Description

The Dropbox Engineering Team builds the technology that creates more enlightened ways of working for hundreds of millions of people. Every day, our platforms-including Dropbox Dash, Dropbox Sign, and our core sync engine-handle over a billion files for users worldwide, creating engineering challenges as great as the opportunity for impact. Our software engineering team uses a range of technologies to solve interesting problems, including Python, React, Node.js, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Android development. We think like a startup but build for an enterprise, exploring new possibilities that transform how people work. If you're excited about turning complex technical challenges into intuitive solutions at scale, join our Engineering team. Areas of work include Machine Learning Engineers, Infrastructure Engineer, Product SWE Frontend and Backend, Mobile Software Engineers (iOS and Android), Engineering Manager, Data Engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Security Engineering, Site Reliability Engineer, Technical Program Managers, Network Engineer, Datacenter Engineer, Technical Supply Chain Manager and more.

Benefits

Dropbox is committed to investing in the holistic health and wellbeing of all Dropboxers and their families. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k) plan with a generous company match and immediate vesting
• Flexible PTO/Paid Time Off, paid holidays, Volunteer Time Off, and more, allowing you time to unplug, unwind, and refresh
• Income Protection Plans: Life and disability insurance
• Business Travel Protection: Travel medical and accident insurance
• Perks Allowance to be used on what matters most to you, whether that's wellness, learning and development, food and groceries, and much more
• Parental benefits including: Parental Leave, Child and Adult Care, Day Care FSA, Fertility Benefits, Adoption and Surrogacy Support, and Lactation Support
• Access to over 10,000 global co-working spaces through Gable.to , making it easy to book flexible workspaces for collaboration or individual work
• Quarterly Cell phone and internet allowance
• Mental health and wellness benefits
• Disability and neurodivergence support benefits

Additional benefit details are available upon request.

Dropbox is an equal opportunity employer. We are a welcoming place for everyone, and we do our best to make sure all people feel supported and connected at work. A big part of that effort is our support for members and allies of internal groups like Asians at Dropbox, BlackDropboxers, enABLE, TODOS (Latinx), Pridebox (LGBTQ), Vets at Dropbox, and Women at Dropbox.