Role Description

As a Software Engineer on the Metadata team, you’ll build and operate the large-scale distributed databases that every Dropbox service depends on. Metadata systems are mission-critical, in the live path for all user operations and must meet stringent requirements for latency, durability, and transactional consistency.

You’ll design and evolve the core infrastructure that manages Dropbox’s databases at scale, enabling fast, reliable access to data for millions of users and hundreds of internal services. This work spans distributed systems, replication, caching, and transactional database systems.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineers across Infrastructure and Product teams to ensure the metadata layer meets business needs and continues to scale with Dropbox’s growth. This is an opportunity to leverage your expertise in distributed systems and grow into broader technical leadership.

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

Design and maintain distributed database systems providing low-latency, strongly consistent data access
Implement and optimize replication, consensus, and caching mechanisms to meet availability and performance goals
Operate production systems, including participating in the on-call rotation, ensuring high availability and data durability
Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to assess current and future use cases and requirements, supporting the development of a mid- to long-term roadmap that reflects these needs
Contribute to system design reviews, postmortems, and reliability improvements
Write high-quality, efficient code in Go and Rust for performance-critical systems

On-call work may be necessary occasionally to help address bugs, outages, or other operational issues, with the goal of maintaining a stable and high-quality experience for our customers.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong expertise in distributed systems fundamentals including replication, consistency, partitioning, and fault tolerance
Experience building database platforms, distributed databases, storage systems, or large-scale database infrastructure
Proficiency in Go, Rust, C++ or similar systems languages
Familiarity with consensus and coordination systems (e.g. Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, etcd)
Experience operating production services and participating in on-call rotations
Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
Excellent collaboration and communication abilities across teams

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building distributed databases or storage systems
Practical experience with and deep understanding of data structures used in storage systems (e.g. LSM trees, B-trees, Hash Indexes)
Experience operating database systems (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra)
Experience with distributed caching, either custom built or operating open source options such as Memcached or Redis
Experience improving reliability and performance in high-scale data systems
Experience working with cross-functional teams to understand their current use cases, identify future needs and requirements, and incorporate them into the team’s roadmap.
Interest in deepening distributed systems expertise and expanding technical leadership