Staff Fullstack Software Engineer, Core Performance

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer at Dropbox, you will serve as the singular technical owner of application performance across the Core organization. This team owns every consumer-facing surface: web, iOS, Android, and desktop. This role addresses one of the company's most visible, cross-cutting technical challenges with a clear mandate: to make Dropbox feel fast on every surface our customers use.

You will operate at the intersection of measurement, engineering, and product impact, owning ambiguous problems that span the entire stack and translate directly into business outcomes for hundreds of millions of users. Notably, there is no existing performance team at Dropbox; you will be responsible for defining the discipline from the ground up.

Your journey begins with the web, where you will be most hands-on. You will profile high-traffic React surfaces, produce flame graphs and heat maps, identify the most valuable opportunities, and drive fixes to shipped, measured wins. From there, you will lead the performance initiative across iOS, Android, and desktop by partnering with internal platform experts. Your focus will shift to coordinating strategy, transferring measurement practices, and driving execution rather than building every component yourself. You will also collaborate across Python and Go backend services, recognizing that perceived performance rarely lives in a single layer.

Your influence will extend across Core Engineering. You will define measurement standards, regression-detection systems, and performance practices that other engineers rely on. Additionally, you are expected to use AI fluently in your own engineering work and lead the optimization of AI-assisted workflows across Core, raising the productivity of every engineer around you. You will bring clarity to uncertainty, raise the bar for engineering excellence through hands-on leadership, and shape how Dropbox thinks about performance for years to come.

In return, you will gain meaningful exposure to senior leadership, build foundational systems that unlock future product capabilities, and grow into an org-level technical strategist, helping advance Dropbox's mission to create a more enlightened way of working.

Career Framework

Our Engineering Career Framework is viewable by anyone outside the company and describes what is expected for our engineers at each of our career levels. You can review our blog post on this topic for more details.

Hiring Process

Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours. If a team has an on-call rotation, all engineers on the team are expected to participate in the rotation as part of their employment. Applicants are encouraged to ask for more details of the rotations to which they are applying.