Principal Software Engineer

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

$248600—$336400 USD

US Zone 3

$221000—$299000 USD