Dima Frid on the daily challenges that inspire innovation and keep his engineering team growing at Tel Aviv

We’re proud to have some of the best engineers in the world working at Dropbox. And many of them work in our Tel Aviv office, where a small but tight-knit team keeps our methods innovative and our standards high. Senior Engineering Manager for Admin Security Dima Frid told us why he feels challenged at Dropbox, and how the Tel Aviv team works together to push each other toward growth every day.

Can you tell us a little about your education and journey to Dropbox?

I did my bachelors degree in both computer science and math. I went on to pursue a master’s in math and spent about a year and a half doing that. It was a beautiful experience and I love math to this very day (not that I remember anything anymore). After that, I started my career as a software engineer in the semiconductor industry, where I moved into a management role at some point. Overall I spent about 10 years in that industry, and it was a great learning experience. After that I went to explore the startup world, both as a software engineer and a manager, gaining diverse experience from enterprise products to consumer based search engines.

What’s your favorite thing about your role?

My favorite thing is that we have great engineering standards and a very high quality bar. We have to be the best engineers we can be. Having that bar is challenging, and it helps everyone including myself to grow, learn, and develop.

One thing that comes to mind is that we’re building more and more complex and sophisticated products for admins of Dropbox business teams. That requires us to venture into new domains and the core of Dropbox, which is about solving very hard software problems. It also requires us to step up and grow and learn more.

Dropbox operates at exabyte scale. Scalability is at the core of everything we do, and we build our software so that it can scale for more and more users and use cases. Another thing is that we aspire to take great care of our users’ data — Dropbox is obsessed with data reliability. That is a part of what makes the software quality bar so high. We solve the hardest challenges of software engineering: building storages and file systems and distributed synchronization engines — these are very hard problems to solve, so that provides plenty of challenges. Every single engineer is exposed to these challenges in one way or another.

In your opinion, what makes Dropbox Tel Aviv unique?

I don’t know where to start! I’ll start with the vibe — we’re about 60, and it’s like a family here. There are no team boundaries or domain boundaries. There’s camaraderie and open honest communication, and a culture of helping each other out. It’s an outstanding people environment.

Another thing that makes Tel Aviv unique in the scene is the quality of people, the bias to action, and the product. Tel Aviv is building products for Dropbox business teams, and one can argue that these products have the capacities of regular Dropbox users, but also facets of administration and management, which makes them very complex and sophisticated. And they have to meet the regular quality and scalability and reliability requirements.

How would you say Dropbox Tel Aviv creates community?

In an inbound sense, I don’t really have a very good scientific explanation for it, but people are bonding very well. Maybe it’s the size of the office. I can imagine that an office of 3000 people operates and behaves differently. Maybe it’s the size that makes for this intimacy and camaraderie. Also — plenty of people are from Tel Aviv, so they share common interests and hangouts and stuff like that. Another thing is that plenty of people are geeky in a good sense. They’re passionate about coding or architecting or hacking or whatever, and that creates a bond as well.

In an outbound sense, we’re pretty present as speakers and sometimes as sponsors at local conferences. We host many meetups on technology and product design. We are engaged with several diversity and charity organizations as well. So I’d say that our presence is pretty felt.

What is your favorite part of the office?

There’s a sofa a couple meters away from my desk by the window. It’s not looking outside, but it’s unbelievably cozy. It’s my favorite spot but it’s frequently taken, so it’s a constant fight to get it!

How are you making the most of working from home?

For me the challenge is mostly about balancing work with family/exercise/time to myself. Having a formal schedule with time slots saved for kids and exercising really helps!

Want to learn more about our Tel Aviv location, and our other offices around the world? Check out our jobs page.