Staff Capacity Engineer
Dropbox
Dropbox is a Virtual First company. For this role, we are hiring in Zones 2 and 3. Please refer to our Compensation section below to see what neighborhoods fall under each Zone.
Company Description
Dropbox is a special place where we are all seeking to fulfill our mission to design a more enlightened way of working. We’re looking for innovative talent to join us on our journey. The words shared by our founders at the start of Dropbox still ring true today. Wouldn’t it be great if our working environment—and the tools we use—were designed with people’s actual needs in mind? Imagine if every minute at work were well spent—if we could focus and spend our time on the things that matter. This is possible, and Dropbox is connecting the dots. The nearly 3,000 Dropboxers around the world have helped make Dropbox a living workspace - the place where people come together and their ideas come to life. Our 700+ million global users have been some of our best salespeople, and they have helped us acquire customers with incredible efficiency. As a result, we reached a billion dollar revenue run rate faster than any software-as-a-service company in history. Dropbox is making the dream of a fulfilling and seamless work life a reality. We hope you’ll join us on the journey.
Team Description
Our Engineering team is working to simplify the way people work together. They’re building a family of products that handle over a billion files a day for people around the world. With our broad mission and massive scale, there are countless opportunities to make an impact.
Role Description
As a Staff Capacity Engineer, you will play a vital role in shaping and optimizing the infrastructure strategy for Dropbox's products and services. You’ll use your expertise to lead impactful projects, drive cost efficiency, and create robust capacity plans to support our 800M+ user base across multiple product categories. You’ll be crucial in areas such as strategic capacity planning, cost optimization, and large-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure management. Your efforts will help maintain the stability and performance of our services while supporting long-term growth and cost efficiency. You will have a major impact on the future of Dropbox’s infrastructure, helping drive scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. You’ll gain exposure to senior leadership and the opportunity to lead high-impact projects. This role offers a dynamic, collaborative environment where you can advance your expertise, contribute to innovative solutions, and build strong relationships across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Lead Capacity Planning and Cost Efficiency Strategy: Own the strategic roadmap for capacity planning and cost optimization across all Dropbox products. Drive the conceptualization, development, and execution of initiatives in partnership with key stakeholders across platform, product, and infrastructure teams
- End-to-End Demand Planning: Conduct in-depth analysis of usage patterns, growth forecasts, and business requirements at the product level. Translate these insights into platform and infrastructure needs and create comprehensive plans for build/buy strategies and execution
- Champion Cost Visibility and Efficiency: Own cost transparency efforts and drive efficiency improvements across private and public cloud environments, improving gross margin
- Develop TCO Models: Design and maintain Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models for key platform components (e.g., storage, compute) and product surfaces (e.g., FSS, Dash) to support informed decision-making
- Oversee Large-Scale Infrastructure Migrations: Lead projects related to the migration of data and services across private and public cloud environments, ensuring minimal disruption and optimization of cost and performance
- Manage Cross-Functional Relationships: Serve as the primary point of contact with physical infrastructure teams (e.g. supply chain, data centers, network, hardware engineering) and software infrastructure teams (e.g. storage, compute, ML). Collaborate closely with finance and product teams to influence capacity planning and alignment
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Minimum of 7+ years of hands-on experience in capacity engineering or a related field, focusing on designing, forecasting, and scaling infrastructure to support high-demand, large-scale environments
- Advanced proficiency in SQL and data modeling for analyzing large datasets and generating insights to support capacity planning and infrastructure optimization
- Strong experience in designing and implementing scalable systems and solutions, including storage, compute, and network infrastructure. Ability to architect end-to-end solutions for complex capacity challenges
- Experience with AWS services and architecture, including but not limited to EC2, S3, RDS, and VPC, to support capacity planning and infrastructure management in cloud environments
- Experience in cloud FinOps with strong capabilities in cost modeling, TCO analysis, and cost optimization for cloud and data center environments
Preferred Qualifications
- Strong coding proficiency and experience with data engineering tools (e.g. Airflow, Databricks) to build scalable data pipelines and logging infrastructure to support capacity planning
- Experience managing and optimizing large-scale environments running both private and public cloud infrastructure
- Experience with operations research, mathematical optimization, and applying AI or machine learning to improve capacity planning
Compensation
US Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
The range(s) listed above is the expected annual salary/OTE (On-Target Earnings) for this role, subject to change.
Please note, OTE are for sales roles only.
Salary/OTE is just one component of Dropbox’s total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program or a sales incentive (target included in OTE) as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Dropbox takes a number of factors into account when determining individual starting pay, including job and level they are hired into, location/metropolitan area, skillset, and peer compensation. We target most new hire offers between the minimum up to the middle of the range.
Dropbox uses the zip code of an employee’s remote work location to determine which metropolitan pay range we use. Current US Zone locations are as follows:
• US Zone 1: San Francisco metro, New York City metro, or Seattle metro
• US Zone 2: Austin (TX) metro, Chicago metro, California (outside SF metro), Colorado, Connecticut (outside NYC metro), Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York (outside NYC metro), Oregon, Pennsylvania (outside NYC or DC metro), Washington DC metro, and West Virginia (DC metro)
• US Zone 3: All other US locations
Benefits
Dropbox is committed to investing in the holistic health and wellbeing of all Dropboxers and their families. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:
- Competitive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 401(k) plan with a generous company match and immediate vesting
- Flexible PTO/Paid Time Off, paid holidays, Volunteer Time Off, and more, allowing you time to unplug, unwind, and refresh
- Income Protection Plans: Life and disability insurance
- Business Travel Protection: Travel medical and accident insurance
- Perks Allowance to be used on what matters most to you, whether that’s wellness, learning and development, food and groceries, and much more
- Parental benefits including: Parental Leave, Child and Adult Care, Day Care FSA, Fertility Benefits, Adoption and Surrogacy Support, and Lactation Support
- Access to over 10,000 global co-working spaces through Gable.to, making it easy to book flexible workspaces for collaboration or individual work
- Quarterly Cell phone and internet allowance
- Mental health and wellness benefits
- Disability and neurodivergence support benefits
Additional benefit details are available upon request.