Join Dropbox as a Senior Infrastructure Software Engineer to design and maintain distributed database systems for millions of users.
Posted by employer 1 month ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 week ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
Requirements
- Experience
- 5+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Infrastructure Software Engineer on the Metadata team at Dropbox focuses on designing and maintaining distributed database systems that ensure low-latency and consistent data access for users. Key skills include proficiency in Go or Rust, along with a strong foundation in distributed systems concepts such as replication and fault tolerance. This position is ideal for seasoned engineers with over five years of experience who are looking to deepen their expertise in database infrastructure and contribute to technical leadership. The role involves collaboration across teams to align the metadata layer with evolving business needs.
Joblaze insights
- Listed 9 days ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Dropbox's career page.
- Dropbox has 46 other open roles including Director, GTM Business Systems, Director, GTM Business Systems, Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2027).
- 1969 active Go roles on Joblaze right now.
- 1661 active C++ roles on Joblaze right now.
- 1357 active PostgreSQL roles on Joblaze right now.
- Pays more than 2% of the 962 salaried Go roles we track (median $164,200). See Go salary trends
Quick facts
- What's the salary range?
- Dropbox lists PLN 272,000–PLN 368,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata Core role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: C++, Cassandra, Go, Memcached, MySQL, Paxos.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Dropbox targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata Core role at Dropbox.
From the original posting
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