Principal Engineer, Identity & Engagement

Dropbox is a Virtual First company that is hiring a Principal Software Engineer, Identity & Engagement to lead the technical direction and execution of core services that power its product ecosystem. The role involves driving modernization efforts, enhancing security and privacy, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to improve user experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for identity and engagement platform services, including APIs, service boundaries, data models, and reliability goals
• Lead multi-quarter modernization efforts (e.g., reducing legacy dependencies, improving scalability, simplifying integrations) with a focus on cohesion, observability, and operational excellence
• Design and improve authentication, authorization, account integrity, and identity lifecycle services with strong security and privacy posture
• Build and evolve the systems that power engagement signals, experimentation hooks, telemetry/analytics pipelines, and usage insights to support product iteration and growth
• Create reusable platform primitives, reference architectures, and best practices that make it easier for product teams to build safely and quickly
• Partner with Product, Design, Security, Infrastructure, and AI/ML teams to align technical decisions with customer outcomes and organizational priorities
• Own delivery of complex initiatives end-to-end—breaking down ambiguous problems, driving alignment, and ensuring high-quality implementation, testing, rollout, and oncall readiness
• Mentor senior engineers, review critical designs, elevate engineering standards, and influence technical direction across teams beyond your immediate scope

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating large-scale backend or platform systems
• Proven ability to lead architecture for distributed systems with high reliability, performance, and security requirements
• Strong expertise in at least two of the following areas: identity/authn/authz, service API design, analytics/telemetry infrastructure, search/retrieval foundations, experimentation platforms, or engagement systems
• Track record of driving modernization efforts in complex environments (e.g., migrating legacy systems, improving data quality and observability, simplifying architecture)
• Excellent technical judgment and ability to balance speed, stability, and long-term maintainability
• Strong communication skills: able to write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and lead technical decision-making across teams
• Experience with cloud-scale identity platforms (SSO, session management, risk signals, account security, privacy controls)
• Familiarity with AI enablement infrastructure, especially data pipelines, engagement signals, retrieval/search systems, and feedback loops
• Experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms with strong compliance and security requirements
• Demonstrated ability to influence org-wide standards and technical strategy (beyond a single team), including mentorship of other tech leads and principals