Principal Software Engineer, Product Engineering

The role

This principal-level engineering position takes responsibility for ambiguous, company-wide technical challenges that affect Dropbox products used by millions. The person partners with senior product and engineering leadership to shape strategy and architecture, while still writing and reviewing key code. A major theme is bringing AI thoughtfully into both the product and the way engineers work.

What you would do

• Take ownership of technical results spanning multiple teams and organizations
• Set long-range technical strategy as the engineering counterpart to senior product and engineering leaders
• Handle vague, high-stakes problems that determine what the company builds and how
• Personally build and implement the most critical foundational pieces of the system
• Align roadmaps across groups and remove structural obstacles to how work gets done
• Design and evolve frontend and backend platforms that support new product features at huge user scale
• Uphold high standards of engineering judgment and rigor in a distributed, remote-first setting
• Push AI use to boost team productivity and to deliver AI-driven product features

What they asked for

• Graduate-level education in computing or a similar technical discipline, or comparable industry experience showing deep mastery
• At least 15 years designing and growing large-scale software systems with lasting effect across teams
• Track record of working at principal level on company-critical problems and guiding long-term direction
• Experience shipping consumer products at scale with attention to usability, speed, reliability, and operations
• Deep, wide technical knowledge across several areas such as frontend, mobile, search, databases, storage, concurrency, and distributed systems
• Hands-on production use of machine learning, LLM APIs, and agent frameworks, with good sense about quality, expense, and risk
• Skill at explaining intricate technical ideas in a convincing way to engineering, product, and executive leaders

Nice to have

• Having established and expanded platforms or architecture standards adopted by many organizations
• History of successfully bringing new technology like machine learning or generative AI into core product and engineering processes with lasting results
• Experience in globally distributed, remote-first engineering teams