Dropbox · 3 weeks ago
Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$241K/yr - $326K/yr
10+ years expDropbox is a leading company in cloud storage and collaboration, seeking a Staff Software Engineer to focus on their Metadata Infrastructure. This role involves defining and executing the technical strategy for metadata systems that support various Dropbox products, while solving complex challenges related to reliability and scalability.
CollaborationEnterprise SoftwareFile SharingPrivate CloudWeb Hosting
Responsibilities
Design and operate Dropbox’s core metadata infrastructure — distributed, transactional systems that serve as the foundation for nearly all products and internal engineering workflows
Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for Dropbox’s metadata database stacks, including storage engines, distributed consensus, caching layers, and access APIs
Lead architecture and implementation efforts that evolve how transactional metadata is modeled, stored, and accessed across Dropbox’s global infrastructure
Identify and solve high-impact, deeply technical problems involving scale, availability, consistency, and latency — navigating ambiguity with strong system-level thinking
Drive cross-functional technical alignment by partnering with platform, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure metadata systems meet the needs of the business and other engineers
Serve as a technical leader and role model, mentoring engineers, shaping engineering culture, and contributing to Dropbox’s high hiring bar through recruiting and interviews
Advance operational excellence by building resilient systems, participating in the on-call rotation, and continuously improving reliability through thoughtful design and rigorous post-incident analysis
Evaluate emerging technologies and integrate industry best practices that enable Dropbox to stay ahead in scale, performance, and developer productivity
Qualification
Required
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
10+ years of advanced software development skills in at least two modern programming languages (e.g., Go, C++, Java, Rust, Python, etc), with the ability to learn and work across multiple stacks
Deep expertise in distributed systems design and operation, including mastery of principles like consistency models, consensus protocols, partitioning, replication, and latency tradeoffs
Experience operating large-scale, transactional database systems in production — particularly as the source of truth in a high-availability, multi-tenant infrastructure environment
Demonstrated project leadership skills, including technical design, work breakdown, multi-workstream coordination, estimation, and milestone planning for high-impact infrastructure
Strong debugging and incident response skills, including hands-on experience in on-call rotations and post-incident analysis for critical infrastructure
Excellent communication and collaboration abilities, including cross-functional influence, mentoring, and the ability to articulate complex system tradeoffs to varied audiences
Proven experience operating and maintaining large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments, supporting high-throughput workloads (e.g., systems serving 10M+ QPS or equivalent read/write intensity)
Preferred
Experience building or scaling metadata systems, distributed databases, or data-access platforms (e.g., RocksDB, Cassandra, CockroachDB, Spanner, MySQL, or similar)
Deep understanding and real world experience with consensus protocols and coordination systems such as Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, or etcd
Experience designing and optimizing cache coherence, read/write paths, or consistency layers at the storage or service tier
Contributions to developer productivity or self-service tooling in large-scale infrastructure organizations
Strong technical mentorship or leadership experience, especially in influencing org-wide engineering direction and up-leveling peers
Demonstrated experience in designing, implementing, and managing Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies and solutions
Company
Dropbox
Dropbox is a smart workspace company that provides secure file sharing, collaboration, and storage solutions.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Dropbox has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (127)
2024 (105)
2023 (103)
2022 (166)
2021 (197)
2020 (157)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$2.41BKey Investors
JP Morgan ChaseJPMorgan PartnersBlackRock
2025-09-09Post Ipo Debt· $700M
2018-03-23IPO
2017-03-30Debt Financing· $600M
Leadership Team
Drew Houston
Founder & CEO
Arash Ferdowsi
Co-Founder
Recent News
2025-12-19
Business Standard India
2025-12-19
2025-12-16
Company data provided by crunchbase