Dropbox is a Virtual First company. For this role, we are currently only authorized to hire candidates from the following provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.

Company Description

Dropbox isn’t just a workplace—it’s a living lab for more enlightened ways of working. We're a global community of more than 2,000 bold visionaries and resourceful doers who are shaping the future of Dropbox—and with it the future of work. Our Virtual First model combines the flexibility of a distributed workplace with the power of human connection, making space for both meaningful work and meaningful relationships. With our start-up mindset and enterprise-level opportunities, you can be who you are and grow into who you’re meant to be. Here, you can own your impact to make work more intuitive, joyful, and human—for you as a Dropboxer and for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If you're ready to push boundaries—and yourself— Dropbox is ready for you.

Team Description

The Dropbox Engineering Team builds the technology that creates more enlightened ways of working for hundreds of millions of people. Every day, our platforms—including Dropbox Dash, Dropbox Sign, and our core sync engine—handle over a billion files for users worldwide, creating engineering challenges as great as the opportunity for impact. Our software engineering team uses a range of technologies to solve interesting problems, including Python, React, Node.js, JavaScript, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Android development. We think like a startup but build for an enterprise, exploring new possibilities that transform how people work. If you're excited about turning complex technical challenges into intuitive solutions at scale, join our Engineering team. Areas of work include Machine Learning Engineers, Infrastructure Engineer, Product SWE Frontend and Backend, Mobile Software Engineers (iOS and Android), Engineering Manager, Data Engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test, Security Engineering, Site Reliability Engineer, Technical Program Managers, Network Engineer, Datacenter Engineer, Technical Supply Chain Manager and more.

Role Description

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Dropbox, you will lead the development of AI-powered intelligent systems that leverage and innovate on large language models (LLMs) to power search relevance and ranking, conversational AI, content creation, automation, and workflow intelligence. You will architect and build complex, scalable ML systems that integrate enterprise-wide context, fine-tune models, and develop new capabilities beyond existing LLM paradigms.

Your work will directly impact Dropbox’s ability to deliver cutting-edge AI-first experiences to users and businesses. You will collaborate across engineering, product management, design, and user research to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, ensuring that Dropbox remains at the forefront of innovation.

Our Engineering Career Framework is viewable by anyone outside the company and describes what’s expected for our engineers at each of our career levels. Check out our blog post on this topic and more here.

Responsibilities

• Build and Scale AI-powered Systems: Design and implement ML-driven solutions that enhance search relevance, ranking, document understanding, conversational AI, and workflow automation.
• LLM Fine-tuning & Customization: Develop techniques to fine-tune, adapt, and enhance LLMs to make them enterprise-ready, ensuring optimal performance for Dropbox’s use cases.
• Innovate on top of LLMs: Push the boundaries of multi-modal AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), in-context learning, and agentic AI to create new product capabilities.
• End-to-End AI Development: Own the full ML lifecycle, from data collection and preprocessing to model training, deployment, and continuous evaluation of AI models in production.
• Technical Strategy & Leadership: Define the multi-year AI/ML roadmap, making key architectural and modeling decisions that align with Dropbox’s long-term vision.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with engineers, designers, product managers, and researchers to integrate AI capabilities into Dropbox’s core product offerings.
• Stay at the Cutting Edge: Keep up with state-of-the-art AI research, evaluating and incorporating advances in deep learning, transformers, multi-modal learning, and foundation models into Dropbox’s AI stack.
• Drive AI-powered Product Innovation: Identify and propose novel product features that can be built with LLMs, working closely with product teams to bring AI-powered experiences to Dropbox users.

Many teams at Dropbox run Services with on-call rotations, which entails being available for calls during both core and non-core business hours. If a team has an on-call rotation, all engineers on the team are expected to participate in the rotation as part of their employment. Applicants are encouraged to ask for more details of the rotations to which the applicant is applying.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or other quantitative fields or related work experience
• 10+ years of experience in engineering with 5+ years of experience building Machine Learning or AI systems
• Designed, fine-tuned, or deployed large-scale machine learning models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), for production use in a real-world application
• Strong industry experience working with large scale data
• Strong collaboration, analytical and problem-solving skills
• Familiarity with the state-of-the-art in Large Language Models 
• Proven software engineering skills across multiple languages including but not limited to Python, Go, C/C++
• Experience with Machine Learning software tools and libraries (e.g., PyTorch, Scikit-learn, numpy, pandas, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or related field with research in machine learning
• Experience with one or more of the following: Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, Learning to Rank, Speech Processing, Learning from Semi-structured Data, Graph Learning, Large Language Models, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Experience building 0→1 ML products at large (Dropbox-level) scale or multiple 0→1 products at smaller scale including experience with large-scale product systems 

Compensation

Canada Pay Range

$219,300—$296,700 CAD

The range listed above is the expected annual salary/OTE for this role, subject to change.

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).

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*
• Retirement savings through a defined contribution pension or savings plan**
• Flexible PTO/Paid Time Off policy in addition to statutory holidays, 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 & groceries, and much more
• Parental benefits including: Parental Leave, Fertility Benefits, Adoptions and Surrogacy support, and Lactation support
• Mental health and wellness benefits

Additional benefits details are available upon request.

*Where group plans are not available, allowances may be provided

**Benefit, amount, and type are dependent on geographical location, based upon applicable law or company policy

Dropbox is an equal opportunity employer. We are a welcoming place for everyone, and we do our best to make sure all people feel supported and connected at work.