Role Description
The Experiences organization at Dropbox is responsible for shaping the core user experiences across mobile, web, desktop, and browser extensions. We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to lead technical strategy and execution across the Experiences org—which includes our Find & Discover, Collab & Assist, and Surfaces & Foundations teams.
This is a critical leadership role that requires deep architectural thinking, strong cross-team influence, and a commitment to engineering craft. You will be responsible for unblocking major platform migrations, leading multi-team app refactors, and setting long-term infrastructure strategy. You’ll work alongside product, engineering, data science, and design leaders to ensure technical execution supports our business goals.
As the first dedicated Staff Engineer in the Experiences org, you’ll serve as the technical glue across teams and platforms, with clear pathways to future Principal-level scope.
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
- Ensure scalable, high-quality client architecture and foundational infrastructure improvements to enhance developer efficiency and platform performance.
- Lead large-scale app refactors to improve long-term architecture.
- Align technical strategy across multiple teams and drive coordination across mobile, desktop, web, and browser surfaces.
- Mentor engineers and tech leads to reduce execution friction and improve engineering craft through best practices, design reviews, and tech debt reduction.
- Enhance operational excellence by influencing processes, tooling, and incident mitigation.
- Define and maintain the technical roadmap, ensuring alignment with user and business needs.
- Represent the team in company-wide technical discussions and forums.
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
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., Physics or Mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
- Deep technical experience working with Electron apps
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years in Staff or Tech Lead roles
- Proven success in driving cross-platform architectural initiatives and scaling systems
- Strong communication and influence across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience leading large-scale migrations, refactors, or foundational infra investments
- Track record of mentorship and improving engineering craft org-wide
- A passion for building consumer applications with elegant and clean interfaces
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience operating in complex, matrixed product organizations
- Familiarity with mobile, web, and desktop architecture
- Experience developing, testing, shipping and supporting a product for hundreds of thousands of users
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
