Distributed Metadata Infrastructure Engineer

Dropbox; United States; Remote; USD 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Dropbox is seeking a Software Engineer for the Metadata team to design and operate large-scale, distributed databases used by all Dropbox services. You’ll work on replication, caching, and transactional systems to provide low-latency, strongly consistent access at scale.

You will collaborate with Infra and Product teams to evolve the metadata layer and contribute to long-term roadmaps. The role emphasizes distributed systems expertise and potential technical leadership growth.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with 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, or C++ (or similar systems languages).
• Familiarity with consensus and coordination systems (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.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain distributed database systems with low-latency, strongly consistent data access.
• Implement and optimize replication, consensus, and caching mechanisms for availability and performance.
• Operate production systems, including on-call rotations, to ensure high availability and data durability.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to shape mid- to long-term roadmaps.
• Contribute to design reviews, postmortems, and reliability improvements.
• Write high-quality, efficient code in Go and Rust for performance-critical systems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Rust

C++

Database platforms

On-call experience

Debugging

Collaboration

Tools

Raft

Paxos

ZooKeeper

etcd

Job description

Dropbox is seeking a Software Engineer for the Metadata team to design and operate large-scale, distributed databases used by all Dropbox services. You’ll work on replication, caching, and transactional systems to provide low-latency, strongly consistent access at scale.

You will collaborate with Infra and Product teams to evolve the metadata layer and contribute to long-term roadmaps. The role emphasizes distributed systems expertise and potential technical leadership growth.