Dropbox is a Virtual First company. For this role, we are currently only authorized to hire candidates from the following provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.
We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for Dropbox’s underlying data foundations that power our business as a whole. This is a hands-on engineering leader who owns the pipelines and data products that Product, GTM, Finance, and the CTO organization depend on to make decisions.
In this role, you will lead and grow a team of data engineers building and operating our ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and serving layers, as well as the self-serve analytics substrate that lets partner teams answer their own questions without bespoke engineering work.
The ideal candidate is a deeply technical, product-minded engineering leader who can hold a high bar on system reliability and data quality while partnering closely with Data Science, Business Intelligence Engineering, Analytics, and Product to turn fragmented, ticket-driven data work into durable, reusable data products.
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.
Data Quality & Observability: Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics.
Self-Serve Platform: Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy.
Cost & Efficiency: Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability.
Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner deeply with Data Science, BIE, Analytics, Product, Data Platform, and the CTO org to define the semantic layer, modeling standards, and data contracts that make downstream work trustworthy and fast.
Engineering Culture: Establish rigorous engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD for data, incident response, and postmortems — and champion the effective, measured use of AI coding tools to improve engineering productivity.
Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience with increasing scope, ideally in high-scale environments.
3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team design.
Deep Technical Expertise: Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration) on a modern lakehouse or warehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).
Reliability & Quality: Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines.
Systems & Modeling: Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers.
Stakeholder Management: Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals.
Platform / Self-Serve Experience: Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy.
AI-Forward Engineering: Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails.
Cost Discipline: Demonstrated success improving compute/storage unit economics without regressing reliability.
Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices.
Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners.
AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.
Canada Pay Range
$209,100—$282,900 CAD
Dropbox isn’t just a workplace—it’s a living lab for designing a more enlightened way of working. We’re a global community of bold visionaries and resourceful doers shaping the future of Dropbox and, in turn, the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the autonomy of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection, creating space for meaningful work and lasting relationships. With a startup mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, we expect Dropbox employees to think critically, stay curious, and use modern tools, including AI, to improve how work gets done. Here, you can be who you are and grow into who you’re meant to be. You own your impact, helping make work more intuitive, joyful, and human for yourself and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If you’re ready to push boundaries and challenge yourself, Dropbox is ready for you.
The Dropbox Engineering Team develops the technology, platforms, and products that create more enlightened ways of working for hundreds of millions of people. Customers rely on Dropbox to manage, share, and collaborate on content seamlessly—our engineering makes that easier and more intuitive than ever before.Our platform features a robust systems software layer that stores and processes exabytes of data, and a suite of growing services that enhance core products like our sharing and sync engine. We’re also driving innovation with new offerings such as Dash, our AI-powered knowledge management engine. Our infrastructure spans high-performance servers and cutting-edge components across multiple data centers worldwide, ensuring reliability, speed, and scalability at a global scale. We think like a startup but build for an enterprise, exploring new possibilities that transform how people work. If you're excited about turning complex technical challenges into intuitive solutions at scale, join our Engineering team.
Dropbox’s Virtual First way of working is designed to help people do their best work with flexibility, autonomy, and connection. Day to day, teams work remotely with nonlinear schedules and core collaboration hours that support deep focus and individual working styles. We prioritize asynchronous communication to improve clarity, respect deep work time, and reduce unnecessary meetings. While remote work is the primary experience for our employees, we also prioritize intentional, in-person connection. We bring teams together through regular team gatherings, on-demand workspaces, and Dropbox Neighborhood events in order to strengthen team cohesion, foster creativity, and enhance momentum. Virtual First is built to provide the same access to opportunity, growth, and impact for everyone, regardless of location.
This role requires travel to offsites and various other team gatherings (approximately 5-10% of the year or 2-3 days per quarter). We provide advance notice when possible and encourage candidates to discuss any accommodation needs during the interview process.
Focus areas include machine learning, data engineering, frontend and backend development, mobile, site reliability, infrastructure, and technical program management
I feel trusted at Dropbox. Here, I’m free to make decisions, own my work end-to-end, and contribute to the company beyond my role.
Dropbox has transformed my career, and I feel empowered to make an impact every single day. I love working with exceptional people in an environment that supports growth, innovation, and disruption.
Every day at Dropbox brings new opportunities to push myself: to try something different and grow my skillset. I’m encouraged at every step.
I know I’m making an impact when our products make users’ lives easier.
Everyone I met during the interview process was working on solving real problems. That’s what attracted me to Dropbox.
Virtual First defines how we work and what we create. By experiencing distributed work firsthand, we know how to make it more intuitive and human.
Dropbox is a global community where you can own your impact. From day one, you’re trusted to experiment boldly, sharpen your craft, and grow with the support of world-class teammates. With our start-up mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, you can be yourself while unlocking your potential.
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Dropbox is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.