Infrastructure Software Engineer, Metadata Core

Stack

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 needs and support a mid- to long-term roadmap
• ▹Contribute to system design reviews, postmortems and reliability improvements
• ▹Write high-quality, efficient code in Go and Rust for performance-critical systems

Requirements

• ▹5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong distributed systems fundamentals (replication, consistency, partitioning, fault tolerance)
• ▹Experience building database platforms, distributed databases, storage systems or large-scale database infrastructure
• ▹Proficiency in Go, Rust, C++ or similar systems languages
• ▹Familiarity with consensus and coordination systems (e.g. Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, etcd)
• ▹Experience operating production services and participating in on-call rotations
• ▹Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
• ▹Excellent collaboration and communication abilities across teams

Nice to have

• ▹Experience building distributed databases or storage systems
• ▹Practical, deep understanding of data structures used in storage systems (LSM trees, B-trees, hash indexes)
• ▹Experience operating database systems (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra)
• ▹Experience with distributed caching, custom-built or open source (e.g. Memcached, Redis)
• ▹Experience improving reliability and performance in high-scale data systems
• ▹Experience working with cross-functional teams to incorporate their needs into the roadmap
• ▹Interest in deepening distributed systems expertise and expanding technical leadership

Soft skills

About the company

Dropbox's Metadata team builds and operates the large-scale distributed databases every Dropbox service depends on; these mission-critical systems sit in the live path of every user operation.