Principal Engineer, Identity & Engagement

Remote, CanadaRemoteFull TimePrincipal$249,700–$337,900 /yrPosted 20 days agoHidden Gem · Himalayas

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Role summary

Dropbox is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical vision and architectural evolution of its next-generation identity platform. This role is critical for enabling secure user onboarding, collaboration, enterprise integrations, and AI-powered workflows across Dropbox's SaaS ecosystem. Responsibilities include defining roadmaps, driving modernization efforts, designing identity and access systems, building engagement foundations, and enabling developer velocity. The ideal candidate will have 12+ years of experience in large-scale backend or platform systems, with proven expertise in identity, distributed systems, and platform engineering. Strong communication and mentorship skills are essential for influencing technical direction and driving complex initiatives.

Role Description

Dropbox is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to define and build the next-generation identity platform powering Dropbox’s product ecosystem.

This platform sits at the center of every Dropbox experience, from user onboarding and collaboration to enterprise integrations and AI-powered workflows. As Dropbox evolves into an AI-native SaaS platform, identity is no longer just about users logging in. It is about securely enabling people, applications, and AI agents to act, collaborate, and automate work on their behalf.

In this role, you will set the technical vision and lead the architectural evolution of Dropbox’s identity systems, spanning authentication, authorization, account lifecycle, and delegated access. You will partner across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and AI teams to build systems that are secure, scalable, and intuitive, while enabling new classes of intelligent, agent-driven experiences.

This is a high-impact, company-level role shaping how trust, access, and control are modeled across Dropbox.

Responsibilities

Technical leadership and architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
Modernization and platform evolution: Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts(e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
Identity and access systems: Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
Engagement and insights foundations: Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements.
Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, experimentation platforms, or engagement systems.
Track record of driving modernization efforts in complex environments(e.g., migrating legacy systems, improving data quality and observability, simplifying architecture).
Excellent technical judgment and ability to balance speed, stability, and long-term maintainability.
Strong communication skills: able to write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and lead technical decision-making across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms(SSO, session management, risk signals, account security, privacy controls).
Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure, especially data pipelines, engagement signals, retrieval/search systems, and feedback loops.
Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements.
Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy(beyond a single team), including mentorship of other tech leads and principals.

Compensation

Canada Pay Range

$249,700—$337,900 CAD

Originally posted on Himalayas

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.
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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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