Role DescriptionAs a Senior Software Engineer on the Storage team, you will help design, build, and operate Dropbox's large-scale storage systems that provide high durability and scalability for millions of users across all of Dropbox products. The Storage team owns the distributed storage infrastructure at the heart of Dropbox, systems responsible for storing exabytes of user data across multiple data centers worldwide.
You'll collaborate with experienced engineers across infrastructure and product teams to improve reliability, optimize performance, and evolve the architecture of Dropbox's storage layer. This role offers deep exposure to distributed systems and storage challenges such as replication, erasure coding, consistency tradeoffs, and performance tuning at massive scale.
It's an ideal opportunity for engineers who love building resilient infrastructure, learning from complex production systems, and growing into technical leadership. You'll gain hands-on experience operating mission-critical services, influence architectural decisions, and directly improve how Dropbox keeps user data safe, durable, and available.
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, implement, and maintain large-scale distributed storage systems that ensure data durability, availability, and performance.
- Collaborate with peers to evolve the architecture of Dropbox's core storage infrastructure for improved scalability and efficiency.
- Contribute to the design of replication, erasure coding, and system lifecycle management systems that balance cost, reliability, and performance.
- Write high-quality, performant, and maintainable code in Go and Rust.
- Participate in the on-call rotation, gaining firsthand experience operating Dropbox's production storage systems
- Investigate and resolve complex production issues, performing root cause analysis and driving continuous reliability improvements.
- Partner with cross-functional teams (Networking, Hardware, Capacity Planning) to deliver end-to-end reliable and cost-efficient storage solutions
- Take ownership of scoped projects and demonstrate growth toward leading larger, cross-team technical initiatives.
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- 9+ years of strong understanding of distributed systems principles, including replication, consistency, and fault tolerance.
- Experience developing and debugging production services in C++, Go, or Rust.
- Familiarity with distributed storage systems, file systems, or data infrastructure at scale.
- Demonstrated ability to write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code in mission-critical environments.
- Experience troubleshooting complex systems and participating in on-call or operational rotations.
- Solid communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work across infrastructure and product teams.
- Eagerness to learn, grow, and contribute to multi-year infrastructure evolution initiatives.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience building and operating large-scale object storage or distributed storage systems (e.g. S3, Ceph, GFS/Colossus).
- Deep interest in systems performance, profiling, and low-level optimization.
- Familiarity with replication protocols, erasure coding, and data placement algorithms.
- Experience with production monitoring, observability, and incident response workflows.
- Contributions to infrastructure projects, open-source systems, or developer tooling that improved reliability and performance.
Durable SkillsAI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
- Awareness: Understand yourself and others.
- Judgment: Evaluate information and make decisions in complex situations.
- Adaptability: Learn, adjust, and stay effective through change.
- Connection: Communicate, collaborate, and build trust.
To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.
CompensationUS Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
US Zone 2
$202,700-$274,300 USD
US Zone 3
$180,200-$243,800 USD
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