Senior Manager, Data Engineering at Dropbox

Job description

Role Description We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for Dropbox’s underlying data foundations that power our business as a whole. 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: U nderstand yourself and others . Judgment: E valuat e information and mak e decisions in complex situations . Adaptability: L earn, adjust, and stay effective through change . Connection: C ommunicat e , collaborat e , 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

Requirements

Must-haves

Role Description
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.
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.
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.
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.

Nice-to-haves

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: U nderstand yourself and others .
Judgment: E valuat e information and mak e decisions in complex situations .
Adaptability: L earn, adjust, and stay effective through change .
Connection: C ommunicat e , collaborat e , 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.

Application prep

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