Principal Engineer, AI-Driven Product Platforms

Dropbox; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 228,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

Dropbox’s Principal Software Engineer, Product Engineering role sits at the intersection of technology, product strategy, and applied AI. You own multi-year, high-impact problems, set long-term technical direction for customer-facing experiences used by millions, and stay hands-on where leverage is greatest.

You will lead architectural standards, collaborate with senior leaders, and drive AI adoption across product capabilities and engineering workflows.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 15+ years designing and evolving large-scale software systems
• Principal-level experience owning company-critical technical problems
• Strong track record delivering consumer-facing products at scale
• Broad expertise across frontend, mobile, databases, storage, concurrency and distributed systems
• Practical experience applying ML/LLM-based APIs and agentic frameworks in production

Responsibilities

• Own and drive technical outcomes across multiple teams and organizations at scale
• Define long-term technical strategy with senior leaders as technical owner for key objectives
• Tackle ambiguous, far-reaching technical and product problems
• Remain hands-on in software development for critical system components
• Influence roadmaps across organizations and remove bottlenecks
• Architect and evolve foundational systems and platforms for new product capabilities
• Model exceptional technical judgment and uphold high engineering standards across a distributed environment
• Drive AI adoption to boost productivity and enable AI-based features

Skills

Principal leadership

AI/ML experience

Product engineering experience

Large-scale systems

Communication to executives

Education

Advanced CS degree or equivalent

Tools

LLM APIs

Distributed systems

Frontend/Backend architecture

Job description

Dropbox’s Principal Software Engineer, Product Engineering role sits at the intersection of technology, product strategy, and applied AI. You own multi-year, high-impact problems, set long-term technical direction for customer-facing experiences used by millions, and stay hands-on where leverage is greatest.

You will lead architectural standards, collaborate with senior leaders, and drive AI adoption across product capabilities and engineering workflows.