Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Dropbox

9d•$180,200 - $274,300

About The Position

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.

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.
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).
Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines.
Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers.
Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals.

Nice To Haves

Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy.
Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails.
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.
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.

Responsibilities

Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics.
Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy.
Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability.
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.
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.
Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning.