Cloud Computing, Software, Productivity, SaaS

Principal Software Engineer, Product Engineering

RemoteRemoteFull TimePrincipalPosted 29 days ago

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Required skills

AI
LLM
agentic frameworks
ML
distributed systems
frontend
backend
mobile
search
databases

Nice to have

company wide platforms
architectural standards
new technologies

Role summary

Dropbox is seeking a Principal Engineer to tackle complex, long-term technical challenges with a focus on applied AI and customer-facing experiences. This role involves defining technical strategy, architecting foundational systems (frontend and backend), and driving AI adoption to enhance both product capabilities and engineering workflows. The Principal Engineer will influence roadmaps across organizations, set high engineering standards, and act as a technical strategist, partnering with senior leadership. The ideal candidate has 15+ years of experience in large-scale systems, practical ML/LLM experience, and strong communication skills, with a background in consumer-facing products and distributed systems.

Role Description

As a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, you will own company critical, loosely defined technical problems with multi year impact, operating at the intersection of technology, product, business strategy, and applied AI. You will define long term technical direction for customer facing experiences used by millions, identifying where AI meaningfully improves customer value and translating evolving business context and industry advances into durable, multi area strategies and roadmaps that shape how Dropbox builds, scales, and innovates, while remaining hands on in software development where it provides the greatest leverage. Your influence will span organizations, setting foundational architecture, driving execution standards, and aligning senior technical and product leaders across boundaries. You will lead the responsible introduction and adoption of AI across product capabilities and engineering workflows, bring clarity to the most complex decisions, institutionalize engineering excellence, and contribute directly through critical design, prototyping, and code reviews. In return, you will operate as a trusted technical partner to senior leadership, shape systems and platforms including AI powered foundations that define Dropbox’s future, and act as a company level technical strategist, advancing Dropbox’s mission to create a more enlightened way of working.

Responsibilities

Own and drive technical outcomes across multiple teams and organizations, delivering company critical customer and business impact at scale.

Define long term technical strategy and partner with senior Product and Engineering leaders as the technical owner for the most important company objectives.

Tackle the most ambiguous and far reaching technical and product problems, shaping what the company builds as much as how it builds it.

Remain deeply hands on in software development, owning and implementing the most critical, complex, and foundational parts of the system where leverage is highest.

Influence and align roadmaps across organizations, resolving structural bottlenecks and changing how Dropbox builds and operates.

Architect and evolve foundational systems (this may involve both frontend and backend systems) and platforms that enable new product capabilities and operate reliably at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

Model exceptional technical judgment and execution rigor, setting and sustaining high engineering standards across a distributed, virtual environment

Drive AI adoption both to increase productivity and to produce AI based features.

Requirements

Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving substantial software development, or equivalent industry experience demonstrating deep technical mastery.

15+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving large scale software systems with sustained impact across multiple teams or organizations.

Demonstrated success operating at a Principal level, owning company critical technical problems and influencing long term technical direction.

Strong experience building consumer facing products at scale, with a deep understanding of user experience, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.

Broad and deep technical expertise across multiple domains, including several of frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage systems, concurrency, and distributed systems.

Practical experience applying modern ML, LLM based APIs, and agentic frameworks in production systems, with sound judgment around quality, cost, and risk.

Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively to senior engineering, product, and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience defining and scaling company wide platforms or architectural standards that are adopted across multiple organizations.

Proven track record of leading the introduction of new technologies such as AI or ML into core products or engineering workflows with durable impact.

Experience operating in highly distributed, virtual first engineering organizations at global scale.

Durable Skills

AI 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.

Compensation

Sample Dropbox interview questions

1
Diameter of a Binary Tree Find the diameter of a binary tree. Input: root = [1,2] Output: 1 Explanation: The longest path is simply the single edge connecting the root node to its only child.
codingmedium
2
Buildings with an Ocean View Find all buildings that have an ocean view. Input: heights = [1,2,3,4] Output: [3] Explanation: Since the ocean is to the right, only the rightmost tallest building (index 3) is not blocked by any others.
codingmedium
3
Pacific and Atlantic Water Flow Calculate water flow from a matrix to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Input: heights = [[2,1],[1,2]] Output: [[0,0],[0,1],[1,0],[1,1]] Explanation: All cells can flow to both oceans because water can move to adjacent cells of equal or lower height or directly off the edges.
codingmedium
4
Encode and Decode Strings Encode a list of strings into a single string and decode it back. Input: strs = ["","hello",""] Output: ["","hello",""] Explanation: Prepends chunk lengths and a delimiter (e.g., "0#5#hello0#") to safely encode and perfectly restore empty strings.
codingmedium
5
Palindromes in Base-10 and Base-k Return the first n integers that are palindromes in both base-10 and base-k. Input: n = 2, k = 4 Output: [1, 5] Explanation: 1 is '1' in base 4, and 5 is '11' in base 4. Both are perfect palindromes in decimal and base 4 simultaneously.
codingmedium

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