No matter where we work: Josh and Jon on how they watched Dropbox Seattle grow from the very beginning — and why they stayed
As our Seattle office has grown over the last few years, we’ve had the incredible opportunity to recruit and work alongside some of the brightest and most dedicated people in the Emerald City. Two such team members are long-time Seattleites Josh Zana and Jon Lee, who have watched the office expand and are still happy to call it home.
Josh, a staff engineer on the ecosystem team, was headed to his on-site interview at headquarters when an incredibly distracting airport burrito caused him to miss his flight to San Francisco. He was certain his chances at the job were shot, but his recruiter told him he could take the next flight out and restructured the interview day for him. Josh ended up landing the role, which was split between locations for a while as the Seattle office was just opening up.
“When I first started, there wasn’t really a Dropbox Seattle yet, so I flew back and forth for a couple of months. My manager and team were really helpful in figuring out how I could spend some weeks here and some weeks there and how I could bring my family for a weekend in SF, things like that. They really made that transition easy for me.”
Josh still occasionally travels between San Francisco and Seattle, as many Dropboxers do to collaborate and bond with their teammates in other locations. But when he’s not able to make the flight, he’s found that digital face time keeps him in sync with his team more than any other method.
“I find that the best way to keep in sync with all these different people is to have a recurring chat with them. Even if it’s a little duplicative from what we’re meeting as a group about, it’s always valuable to get that time together.”
Like Josh, Jon was another one of our early Seattle team members. As an engineer on the big core data team, it could have been easy to feel siloed in his role. But Jon found that the small size of the office helped him to bond with other team members and have a better sense of Dropbox’s happenings as a whole.
“Part of the reason I joined Seattle was because it felt a lot more like a small community. There were only around 40 people here, and you would go to lunch and see all the same faces. But everyone was working on different projects and different teams, so it gave you a lot of context across the company.”
As the Seattle office has grown, Jon hasn’t lost that sense of community. In fact, it’s only grown — the office is so connected that sometimes he forgets he’s in a remote location at all.
“It’s one of those things that if it’s done right, you don’t notice. From day to day, I don’t notice! We have Seattle versions of all the company-wide events, and we have an office manager who’s planning all these things for us. There’s not a feeling that we’re missing out because we’re not in San Francisco. One thing that has changed over time and has been a big help has been the commitment to building out a team and finding impactful projects to drive out of Seattle so we can make our own decisions on big projects. There’s a real commitment to Seattle.”
Want to learn more about our Seattle office and the available opportunities there? Visit our jobs page.
