Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer focused on the Metadata Infrastructure organization, you will play a central role in shaping and evolving the transactional database systems that underpin nearly every Dropbox product. The Metadata Core and Metadata Services teams together operate foundational systems that manage Dropbox’s transactional metadata at global scale, powering workloads across storage, sync, sharing, AI, and collaboration features. You’ll be responsible for defining and executing the multi-year technical strategy for this critical infrastructure — spanning distributed consensus, replication, caching layers, and high-performance storage engines — while staying deeply engaged in solving today’s real-world reliability and scalability challenges. Your work will have broad, company-wide impact, driving architectural alignment, enabling new product capabilities, and directly improving the productivity of engineering teams across Dropbox. This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, enjoy deep technical problem solving, and want to lead through influence while building resilient, developer-focused infrastructure. By joining this team, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the future of metadata systems at Dropbox, gain exposure to senior leadership, and help set the technical culture for some of the most business-critical systems in the company.

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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

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 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 Qualifications

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.

Compensation

US Zone 1

$240,600

—

$325,500 USD

US Zone 2

$216,500

—

$292,900 USD

US Zone 3

$192,400

—

$260,400 USD