Principal Engineer

Role Description 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. This includes mission-critical infrastructure across identity and access, engagement and insights platforms, foundational APIs, and the core cross-product services that underpin everything from user onboarding to advanced AI-powered workflows. 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. You’ll partner closely with engineering leaders, product, design, security, and infrastructure teams to modernize systems, improve reliability and developer velocity, and unlock smarter user experiences. The future of work is being built on strong Identity & Engagement, and Dropbox is doubling down on platform investments to accelerate AI-driven innovation and deeper customer value. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll lead the architectural evolution of these systems, mentor engineers across the org, and deliver foundational improvements that help Dropbox move faster and smarter. 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 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 (e.g., migrating legacy systems, improving data quality and observability, simplifying architecture). 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 across teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms (SSO, session management, risk signals, account security, privacy controls). Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure, especially data pipelines, engagement signals, retrieval/search systems, and feedback loops. Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements. Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy (beyond a single team), including mentorship of other tech leads and principals. Compensation US Zone 1 This role is not available in Zone 1 US Zone 2 $256,300 - $346,700 USD US Zone 3 $227,800 - $308,200 USD