Senior Engineering Manager, Core AI Platform

Role Description

At Dropbox, we believe in simplifying the way people work together. We provide a range of innovative cloud‑based solutions to empower individuals and businesses to share, access, and collaborate on their files seamlessly. Engineering Managers are pivotal in shaping our mission of building a more enlightened way of working where everyone can unleash their creative potential without constraints.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you’ll thrive in our team if you love chasing impact, working through ambiguity, and developing a culture of innovation. In this role, you’ll lead a team of 12–20 engineers, driving direct business and customer impact independently. You’ll work closely with direct reports, cross‑functional partners, and other teams to build the future of Dropbox. Our culture rewards bias for action, engineering partnership in defining strategy, and efficient operational excellence. The ideal candidate will possess strong leadership skills, technical expertise, and a passion for driving results in a collaborative, virtual‑first environment.

On our Core AI Platform team you will lead AI integrations into Dropbox’s flagship File Sync & Share product. This team is responsible for integrating the Dash product into existing file‑focused workflows and for our existing Dropbox customers, as well as evolving Dash to become a platform product. The team will create a new platform/API abstraction to enable all Core teams to easily integrate with AI‑powered capabilities and build agents leveraging Dash and other technologies. This high‑visibility role leads a high priority for Dropbox and has the opportunity to shape our future company direction, as we evolve the Dropbox product from sync and storage to an AI‑powered workspace.

Our Engineering Career Framework is viewable by anyone outside the company and describes what’s expected for our engineers at each of our career levels. Check out our blog post on this topic and more.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage up to 20 direct reports as a single execution unit
• Partner with multiple Product Managers to plan roadmaps and sprints
• Be accountable for high‑quality execution on critical and high‑visibility business objectives
• Make trade‑offs between feature work and addressing long‑term technical debt
• Excellence in software quality, engineering practices and operations
• Lead the team through standard Agile processes such as backlog management, stand‑ups, retros, etc.
• Review and approve engineering designs and set technical direction in collaboration with a Technical Lead
• Drive cross‑org initiatives alongside managing execution responsibilities
• Drive career conversations and career plans for your direct reports

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics) or equivalent technical experience
• Minimum 8 years of people‑management experience with an engineering team
• Minimum 10 years as a software engineer or equivalent technical experience
• Experience managing engineering organizations of 20 or more and managing managers
• Experience building or integrating with AI products
• Worked in a platform team or a developer‑facing API product with both internal and external consumers
• Running a standard Agile process such as backlog management, stand‑ups, retros, etc.
• Results‑driven, especially good at balancing execution predictability with the agility needed to bring a new product to market

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience shipping AI‑powered features in production, collaborating closely with ML engineers and product teams
• Strong backend engineering skills with systems that support model serving, inference, and data pipelines at scale
• Strong background in AI agent infrastructure and building AI agents
• Ability to evaluate AI models for a specific use case and advise on build vs buy decisions
• Expertise in distributed systems architecture — designing for scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and graceful degradation in multi‑service environments.

Compensation

Canada Pay Range: $200,600 — $271,400 CAD