Is Dropbox fully remote, or will I ever need to go to an office?

Remote is the primary way of working, but Dropbox keeps on-demand Studios and workspaces you can use at no cost, and teams typically gather in person for offsites of 2 to 3 days per quarter, with roughly 5 to 10% travel being typical. In-person time is intentional and community-focused rather than a return-to-office requirement.

What does async by default look like day to day?

You work a nonlinear schedule of your own design, anchored by core collaboration hours that overlap across time zones, and written asynchronous communication is preferred over meetings to protect focus time. Dropbox also publishes free 4-week courses on its careers site teaching best practices for thriving in distributed work.

How does Dropbox set pay for remote roles?

Pay is geo-based: salary ranges are published in job postings, segmented into three US zones plus country-level ranges for Canada, Poland, and Mexico. The zip code of your remote work location determines which metropolitan pay range applies.

Which benefits stand out for remote employees?

Highlights include a 100% 401(k) match up to $6,000 per year, a quarterly perks allowance usable for childcare, wellness, ergonomics, and learning, a $100 monthly gym and wellness reimbursement plus the Peloton Corporate Wellness Program, and up to $145 per month toward phone and internet. Parental leave runs up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

Do employees actually like the Virtual First model?

Recent internal surveys on the careers site report that 87% of employees are happy with the current balance of in-person and virtual experiences and 90% feel they have colleagues they can trust. It suits people who value autonomy, strong written communication, and deliberate rather than constant in-person contact.

Is Dropbox fully remote, or will I ever need to go to an office?

Remote is the primary way of working, but Dropbox keeps on-demand Studios and workspaces you can use at no cost, and teams typically gather in person for offsites of 2 to 3 days per quarter, with roughly 5 to 10% travel being typical. In-person time is intentional and community-focused rather than a return-to-office requirement.

What does async by default look like day to day?

You work a nonlinear schedule of your own design, anchored by core collaboration hours that overlap across time zones, and written asynchronous communication is preferred over meetings to protect focus time. Dropbox also publishes free 4-week courses on its careers site teaching best practices for thriving in distributed work.

How does Dropbox set pay for remote roles?

Pay is geo-based: salary ranges are published in job postings, segmented into three US zones plus country-level ranges for Canada, Poland, and Mexico. The zip code of your remote work location determines which metropolitan pay range applies.

Which benefits stand out for remote employees?

Highlights include a 100% 401(k) match up to $6,000 per year, a quarterly perks allowance usable for childcare, wellness, ergonomics, and learning, a $100 monthly gym and wellness reimbursement plus the Peloton Corporate Wellness Program, and up to $145 per month toward phone and internet. Parental leave runs up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

Do employees actually like the Virtual First model?

Recent internal surveys on the careers site report that 87% of employees are happy with the current balance of in-person and virtual experiences and 90% feel they have colleagues they can trust. It suits people who value autonomy, strong written communication, and deliberate rather than constant in-person contact.

Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Dropbox

Fully Remote

Job Description

Role Description

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for the reliability, quality, cost, and velocity of Dropbox's core data platform. This is a hands-on engineering leader who owns the pipelines and data products that Product, GTM, Finance, and the CTO organization depend on to make decisions.

In this role, you will lead and grow a team of data engineers building and operating our ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and serving layers, as well as the self-serve analytics substrate that lets partner teams answer their own questions without bespoke engineering work.

The ideal candidate is a deeply technical, product-minded engineering leader who can hold a high bar on system reliability and data quality while partnering closely with Data Science, Business Intelligence Engineering, Analytics, and Product to turn fragmented, ticket-driven data work into durable, reusable data products.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

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.

Durable Skills

AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:

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.

To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.

Compensation

US Zone 1

This role is not available in Zone 1

US Zone 2

$202,700—$274,300 USD

US Zone 3

$180,200—$243,800 USD

Benefits & Perks

Health & Wellness

Health Insurance

Dropbox provides medical coverage through Anthem (PPO or HSA) or Kaiser HMO (CA and HI only) for employees and their families.

Dental Insurance

Dental coverage is provided through Guardian Dental for employees and dependents.

Vision Insurance

Vision coverage through Guardian VSP includes a $250 annual allowance for frames or lenses.

Mental Health Benefits

Mental health support is provided through Modern Health, which offers coaching and therapy for employees.

Life Insurance

Life insurance is provided at 2x base salary up to $1M, with AD&D coverage included.

Disability Insurance

Short-term disability covers 60% of pay up to $2,500 per week, and long-term disability covers 60% up to $15,000 per month.

Flexible Spending Account (FSA)

Pre-tax flexible spending accounts are available for healthcare and dependent care expenses.

Health Savings Account (HSA)

When enrolled in the HSA medical plan, Dropbox contributes $233 per month ($2,796 per year) to the employee HSA.

Pet Insurance

Dropbox offers pet insurance coverage for employee pets.

Gender Affirming Care

Health coverage includes transgender healthcare benefits supporting gender-affirming treatments.

Fitness Stipend

Dropbox provides a $100 per month gym and wellness reimbursement plus full free access to the Peloton Corporate Wellness Program.

Wellness Programs

A quarterly perks allowance of up to $5,000-$7,000 per year covers wellness, caregiver support, productivity, ergonomics, learning, and groceries.

Employee Assistance Program

Dropbox provides an Employee Assistance Program with confidential counseling and support resources.

Financial

401(k) / Retirement Plan

Dropbox offers a 401(k) retirement plan including a Mega Backdoor Roth feature allowing up to $23,000 per year in additional after-tax contributions ($30,500/yr for employees 50+).

401(k) Match

Dropbox provides a 100% match on employee 401(k) contributions up to $6,000 per year, disbursed quarterly ($1,500/qtr) with a year-end true-up.

Equity / RSUs

All regular employees receive Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) that vest over 4 years, quarterly at 6.25% per quarter, with no traditional 1-year cliff.

Time Off

Unlimited PTO

Dropbox offers an unlimited PTO policy for vacation and personal time.

Unlimited Sick Days

Dropbox provides unlimited sick leave separate from vacation PTO.

Paid Holidays

Dropbox provides paid holidays in addition to PTO.

Military Leave

Dropbox provides dedicated paid military leave for employees serving in the armed forces.

Remote & Equipment

Company Equipment

Dropbox provides a custom work station and company phone for employees.

Company Offsites / Retreats

Teams gather quarterly for in-person offsites lasting 2-3 days, supplemented by Dropbox Neighborhood community events and on-demand Studios for collaboration.

Coworking Allowance

Dropbox provides access to On-Demand workspaces and Studios at no cost to employees.

Family & Care

Parental Leave

Paid parental and family leave, with assistance for adoption and surrogacy and access to back-up care for both children and adults. The most recent duration Dropbox published itself was 24 weeks of paid parental leave for all employees.

Adoption Leave

Adoption assistance reimburses up to $25,000 per child with a $50,000 lifetime maximum, alongside adoption and surrogacy support.

Fertility Benefits

Assistance for adoption and surrogacy for growing families.

Professional Growth

Learning & Development Budget

Dropbox provides a continuing education stipend, tuition reimbursement, online course subscriptions, Dropbox-sponsored tech talks, and Lunch and Learns; learning is also an eligible category under the quarterly perks allowance.

Mentorship Program

Dropbox runs a structured mentorship program for employees plus apprenticeship programs.

Defined Career Pathways

Dropbox publishes an Engineering Career Framework that defines expectations at each level and offers customized development tracks plus a promote-from-within practice.

Culture & Perks

Charity Matching

Dropbox provides a 100% donation match for employee charitable giving up to $2,000 per year.

Employee Product Discount

Employees receive exclusive discounts with partnered companies and on Dropbox products.

Employee Resource Groups

Dropbox supports Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and a Dropbox Neighborhood community program for connection across the global workforce.

Employee Recognition Awards

Job Description

Role Description

Responsibilities

Requirements

Preferred Qualifications

Durable Skills

Compensation

Compensation

Benefits & Perks

Health & Wellness

Financial

Time Off

Remote & Equipment

Family & Care

Professional Growth

Culture & Perks

Tech Stack

JavaScript & Libraries

Frameworks

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dropbox fully remote, or will I ever need to go to an office?

What does async by default look like day to day?

How does Dropbox set pay for remote roles?

Which benefits stand out for remote employees?

Do employees actually like the Virtual First model?

Interested in this role?

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