Unpacking how our staff engineers are shaping the future of Dropbox with our CEO and President

Running a successful tech company means building a team of engineers that represent the best minds in the industry — including staff engineers. These are senior-level employees who lead the engineering pack into the exciting future. Last month, our staff engineers hosted their very first virtual summit, complete with the opportunity to hear from our CEO Drew Houston and President Timothy Young. Read on for their perspective on what lies ahead for Dropbox, and the vital role that staff engineers will play in defining our success.

Looking back as Dropbox enters its second decade, what is something in engineering that we’re better at now than we were a few years ago?

Drew: We’ve gotten really good at recognizing that we only have so much bandwidth and that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. In the beginning, we created these systems that were a lot of fun to build but took a lot of effort to maintain. We’ve always been good at crushing engineering problems, but now we’re really good at having more judgment in recognizing our limitations and prioritizing which things really need solving.

Engineering excellence and craftmanship have always been an important part of our DNA. What do you think the most important new value will be for engineering in the next decade?

Drew: I don’t know if it’s just one pithy value. I think at our scale, it’s going to include a lot of trade offs, and a lot of what’s in front of us needs an interdisciplinary approach. One of the tech challenges that’s top of mind for me is how we transform our core business from syncing your files to organizing all cloud content. We have to shift from a system that is the primary storer of files to one that can also deal with URLs in a browser. We have to figure out a way to do it that takes advantage of the scale we’ve already built and the problems we’ve already solved and then extend that to the cloud world in a way that’s consistent for users. Engineering has to inform that in a pretty fundamental way.

Timothy: Staff engineers and engineers in general are really the drive train of this company. When I think about where we are today and what we’re facing, I think success is going to mean helping this group and the broader engineering community think about and embrace change. Engineering has a huge role to play in driving the company forward, and it starts with looking at where our users are moving.

Is there something you’d like to ask every staff engineer to do or spend time thinking about in 2022?

Drew: Remenbering that we’re one company. You may be primarily focused on a couple of variables while others are focused elsewhere, but how do we solve all of these problems as a company, without silos? It’s really exciting from a technical perspective to drive this transformation from just syncing files to organizing all your cloud stuff. There’s a lot of technical challenges in there, so we also have to think about where we should break away from some of our decisions that were made long ago in Dropbox history. Engineering leadership has a huge role to play in figuring that out.

Timothy: It’s an exciting time for all of you to be here and think about next year. How do you want to add your fingerprint to the culture, the product, the platform, the teams? Really think about how you want to infuse your own perspective and leave a lasting imprint at Dropbox. Be curious. What disruptive, almost heretical ideas do you have that you can put out there? Some of the craziest ideas are the ones we want to begin to invest in and take a chance on.

Interested in learning more about our engineering teams and the part you may be able to play in creating our future alongside them? Visit our jobs site.