At Dropbox, we believe in simplifying the way people work together. We provide a range of innovative cloud-based solutions to empower individuals and businesses to share, access, and collaborate on their files seamlessly. Engineering Managers are pivotal in shaping our mission of building a more enlightened way of working where everyone can unleash their creative potential without constraints.
This Senior Engineering Manager will partner with a dedicated Product Manager to be the directly responsible individuals for executing on critical company-wide business objectives, with direct oversight from the CEO. They will accountable for the business impact of the same.
This team will own the Dropbox’s Sync platform focused on delivering a faster, more reliable, and intuitive experience across all major operating systems. The team will modernize core sync architecture, reduce customer-reported issues, and launch highly requested features that simplify file access and improve performance. As OS platforms evolve, this work ensures Dropbox remains trusted for seamless file sync—while laying the foundation for future product innovation.
As an Engineering Manager, you’ll thrive in our team if you love chasing impact, working through ambiguity, and developing a culture of innovation. In this role, you’ll lead a team of 12-25 engineers, leveraging your robust managerial toolbox to drive direct business and customer impact independently. You’ll work closely with your direct reports, cross-functional partners, and other teams to build the future of Dropbox. Our team culture rewards a bias for action, engineering partnership in defining our strategy, and efficient operational excellence. The ideal candidate will possess strong leadership skills, technical expertise, and a passion for driving results in a collaborative, virtual-first environment.
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- Directly manage up to 25 direct reports, as a single execution unit
- Partner with multiple Product Managers to plan roadmaps and sprints
- Accountable for high quality execution on critical and high visibility business objectives
- Responsible for making tradeoffs between feature work and addressing long term technical debt
- Responsible for excellence in software quality, engineering practices and operations
- Lead their team through standard Agile processes, such as backlog management, stand ups, retros, etc
- Review and Approve engineering designs and able to set technical direction (in collaboration with a Technical Lead)
- Drive cross-org initiatives alongside execution responsibilities
- Drive career conversations and career plans for your direct reports
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- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics) or equivalent technical experience
- Minimum of 8 years of people management experience with an engineering team
- Minimum of 10 years as a software engineer or equivalent technical experience
- Must have experience managing engineering organizations of 20 or above, and experience managing managers
- Must have worked in a consumer user-facing team (versus a platform team, a developer-facing API-based product, etc)
- Must have experience running a standard Agile process such as backlog management, stand ups, retros, etc
- Experience designing and building software capable of reaching millions of daily users
- Partner with product managers and analysts, and external partners to deeply understand the needs of our users and build experiences that serves those needs
- Proficiency in building user-facing software and supporting web/desktop systems and libraries
- Ability to handle full-stack projects and deliver minimum viable products efficiently
- Experience with clients, operating system internals, filesystems, databases
- Proven software engineering skills across multiple languages such has Python, Rust or Go
