Role Description
Dropbox is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to define and build the next-generation identity platform powering Dropbox’s product ecosystem.
This platform sits at the center of every Dropbox experience, from user onboarding and collaboration to enterprise integrations and AI-powered workflows. As Dropbox evolves into an AI-native SaaS platform, identity is no longer just about users logging in. It is about securely enabling people, applications, and AI agents to act, collaborate, and automate work on their behalf.
In this role, you will set the technical vision and lead the architectural evolution of Dropbox’s identity systems, spanning authentication, authorization, account lifecycle, and delegated access. You will partner across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and AI teams to build systems that are secure, scalable, and intuitive, while enabling new classes of intelligent, agent-driven experiences.
This is a high-impact, company-level role shaping how trust, access, and control are modeled across Dropbox.
Responsibilities
- Technical leadership and architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
- Modernization and platform evolution: Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
- Identity and access systems: Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
- Engagement and insights foundations: Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
- Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
- Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
- Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.
Requirements
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
- Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements.
- Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, exper
Role Description
Dropbox is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to define and build the next-generation identity platform powering Dropbox’s product ecosystem.
This platform sits at the center of every Dropbox experience, from user onboarding and collaboration to enterprise integrations and AI-powered workflows. As Dropbox evolves into an AI-native SaaS platform, identity is no longer just about users logging in. It is about securely enabling people, applications, and AI agents to act, collaborate, and automate work on their behalf.
In this role, you will set the technical vision and lead the architectural evolution of Dropbox’s identity systems, spanning authentication, authorization, account lifecycle, and delegated access. You will partner across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and AI teams to build systems that are secure, scalable, and intuitive, while enabling new classes of intelligent, agent-driven experiences.
This is a high-impact, company-level role shaping how trust, access, and control are modeled across Dropbox.
Responsibilities
- Technical leadership and architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals.
- Modernization and platform evolution: Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence.
- Identity and access systems: Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture.
- Engagement and insights foundations: Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth.
- Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities.
- Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness.
- Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope.
Requirements
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems.
- Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements.
- Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, exper
