Lead and grow a data engineering team responsible for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and serving layers. Ensure data quality, observability, cost-efficiency, and reliable SLAs. Build self-serve analytics substrate, define semantic layer and data contracts, implement engineering best practices, and partner cross-functionally with Data Science, BI, Analytics, and Product.
Role Description Responsibilities
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
CompensationUS 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
Similar Jobs at Dropbox - TEST- GH API (NoEA)
Fitness • Food • Healthtech • Other
The Staff Software Engineer will lead performance initiatives on various platforms, improve application performance, and define engineering standards, focusing on hands-on problem solving and strategic influence across teams.
Top Skills:
Ai ToolingGoJavaScriptLlmsPythonReactRum Telemetry
Fitness • Food • Healthtech • Other
Lead global sales enablement to drive revenue through targeted programs: diagnose performance gaps with data, build role-based training and playbooks, align cross-functionally, measure impact, and scale onboarding, launches, manager coaching, and AI-enabled enablement.
Top Skills:
Agent AssistAIGongHighspot
Fitness • Food • Healthtech • Other
Lead strategy and architecture for the enterprise context layer powering AI: define authoritative sources, content standards, access and control models, connector and platform decisions, federated stewardship, and evaluation metrics to ensure reliable, permission-aware AI retrieval, grounding, and safe automated actions across the company.
Top Skills:
AtlassianCitationsCopilot SearchDitaEmbeddingsGroundingKcsKnowledge GraphsMicrosoft 365Nist Ai RmfNotionOntologiesOwasp GenaiRetrieval-Augmented GenerationSemantic ChunkingSemantic ModelsServicenowSlackVector Search
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
