Principal Engineer, Identity & Engagement

Dropbox is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to drive the technical direction and execution of the core services that power Dropbox’s product ecosystem.

In this role, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader,setting architecture, raising the engineering bar, and shipping high-impact platform capabilities used 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 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.
• Developer velocity and platform enablement: Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes.
• Execution and quality: Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end.
• Mentorship and influence: Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction.

Requirements

• 10+ 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, experimentation platforms, or engagement systems.
• Track record of driving modernization efforts in complex environments.
• Excellent technical judgment and ability to balance speed, stability, and long-term maintainability.
• Strong communication skills: able to write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and lead technical decision-making.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms.
• Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure.
• Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy.