Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Dropbox is a global technology company that provides content management, sharing, collaboration, and knowledge management solutions. The Senior Manager, Data Engineering will lead and grow the team responsible for data foundations, pipelines, data products, and self-serve analytics platforms while ensuring reliability, quality, efficiency, and strong cross-functional partnerships.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• • 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
• • Awareness: Understand yourself and others
• • Judgment: Evaluate information and make decisions in complex situations
• • Adaptability: Learn, adjust, and stay effective through change
• • Connection: Communicate, collaborate, and build trust
• This role requires travel to offsites and various other team gatherings (approximately 5-10% of the year or 2-3 days per quarter)
• • 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
• • Ownership: You use AI responsibly by protecting data, applying sound judgment, and taking accountability for the quality and accuracy of your work
• • Experimentation: You explore new AI capabilities and apply them to improve workflows within approved tools and practices
• • Leverage: You use AI to enhance thinking, improve efficiency, and increase your impact and your team's
• • Learning: You stay current on emerging AI tools and trends, continuously build your skills, and share what you learn with others