Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Remote
USD 248,600.00 - 336,400.00 per year
Full Time

Skills

Strategic Thinking
Apache Velocity
Due Diligence
Mergers and Acquisitions
Product Design
Dropbox
Innovation
Roadmaps
IT Management
Scalability
Acquisition
Engineering Management
Product Development
Startups
Systems Design
IaaS
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning (ML)
Productivity

Job Details

Role Description

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to shape the future of Dropbox through bold new ideas and technical leadership. You'll help define the vision, architecture, and execution for our most forward-looking products - building the foundation for what comes next at Dropbox.

This role sits at the heart of innovation, blending hands-on engineering with strategic thinking. You'll explore new product spaces, prototype ideas that don't yet have a home, and guide how we integrate new technologies - whether we build them or bring them in. Along the way, you'll help foster a strong, collaborative engineering culture and partner closely with product, design, and strategy to turn high-potential ideas into real impact.
Responsibilities
  • Build and foster a strong engineering culture focused on excellence, velocity, and innovation
  • Define the architecture and integration strategy for new initiatives, including both internally developed and acquired products
  • Conduct technical due diligence on potential M&A targets to assess scalability, quality, and strategic fit
  • Rapidly prototype new product ideas and validate emerging opportunities that fall outside existing teams
  • Partner cross-functionally with product, design, and strategy teams to translate vision into technical execution
  • Maintain a high technical bar and guide the team through complex architectural decisions
  • Contribute to shaping Dropbox's long-term innovation roadmap through technical insight and experimentation
Requirements
  • 10+ years of full-stack engineering experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership role
  • Proven success operating at both startup and enterprise scale-building early MVPs and scaling to millions of users
  • Deep understanding of product architecture evolution and trade-offs between speed and scalability
  • Experience with technical diligence and evaluating software systems for integration or acquisition
  • Some experience in engineering management preferred
  • Strong bias toward experimentation and comfort navigating high-ambiguity problem spaces
Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience leading 0 1 product development or founding early-stage startup teams
  • Demonstrated success incubating and scaling new technologies or products within a larger organization
  • Strong background in distributed systems design, data-intensive applications, or cloud infrastructure
  • Familiarity with modern AI/ML technologies, developer platforms, or productivity tools
Compensation

US Zone 1

This role is not available in Zone 1

US Zone 2

$248,600-$336,400 USD

US Zone 3

$221,000-$299,000 USD
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