About this Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata Services role at Dropbox
Dropbox · Remote · Remote - Poland
Role Description
As a Software Engineer on the Metadata team, you’ll build and operate the large-scale distributed databases that every Dropbox service depends on. Metadata systems are mission-critical, in the live path for all user operations and must meet stringent requirements for latency, durability, and transactional consistency.
You’ll design and evolve the core infrastructure that manages Dropbox’s databases at scale, enabling fast, reliable access to data for millions of users and hundreds of internal services. This work spans distributed systems, replication, caching, and transactional database systems.
You’ll collaborate closely with engineers across Infrastructure and Product teams to ensure the metadata layer meets business needs and continues to scale with Dropbox’s growth. This is an opportunity to leverage your expertise in distributed systems and grow into broader technical leadership.
Responsibilities
- Design and maintain distributed database systems providing low-latency, strongly consistent data access
- Implement and optimize replication, consensus, and caching mechanisms to meet availability and performance goals
- Operate production systems, including participating in the on-call rotation, ensuring high availability and data durability
- Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to assess current and future use cases and requirements, supporting the development of a mid- to long-term roadmap that reflects these needs
- Contribute to system design reviews, postmortems, and reliability improvements
- Write high-quality, efficient code in Go and Rust for performance-critical systems
On-call work may be necessary occasionally to help address bugs, outages, or other operational issues, with the goal of maintaining a stable and high-quality experience for our customers.
Requirements
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
- 5+ years of professional software development experience
- Experience designing and implementing software using distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency, partitioning, and fault tolerance
- Experience building databases, storage systems, or large scale data infrastructure
- Proficient in programming and debugging across a range of languages such as Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java
- Familiarity with consensus and coordination systems (e.g. Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, etc)
- Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building distributed databases or storage systems
- Practical experience with and deep understanding of data structures used in storage systems (e.g. LSM trees, B-trees, Hash Indexes)
Poland Pay Range
272 000 zł—368 000 zł PLN
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