Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata Core

Dropbox is hiring a Software Engineer to work on the Metadata team, responsible for building and operating large-scale distributed databases that are mission-critical for all user operations. The role involves designing and evolving core infrastructure managing Dropbox's databases at scale to enable fast, reliable data access for millions of users and internal services.

• 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

Nice to have:

• 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

• 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 roadmap development
• 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 customers.