.png)
The Staff Capacity Engineer will shape and optimize Dropbox's infrastructure strategy, focusing on capacity planning, cost optimization, and managing large-scale hybrid cloud environments. The role involves leading projects, conducting in-depth analysis for demand planning, and developing Total Cost of Ownership models, while collaborating with various teams to drive efficiency and transparency.
Role Description
As a Staff Capacity Engineer, you will play a vital role in shaping and optimizing the infrastructure strategy for Dropbox's products and services. You’ll use your expertise to lead impactful projects, drive cost efficiency, and create robust capacity plans to support our 800M+ user base across multiple product categories. You’ll be crucial in areas such as strategic capacity planning, cost optimization, and large-scale hybrid cloud infrastructure management. Your efforts will help maintain the stability and performance of our services while supporting long-term growth and cost efficiency. You will have a major impact on the future of Dropbox’s infrastructure, helping drive scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. You’ll gain exposure to senior leadership and the opportunity to lead high-impact projects. This role offers a dynamic, collaborative environment where you can advance your expertise, contribute to innovative solutions, and build strong relationships across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Lead Capacity Planning and Cost Efficiency Strategy: Own the strategic roadmap for capacity planning and cost optimization across all Dropbox products. Drive the conceptualization, development, and execution of initiatives in partnership with key stakeholders across platform, product, and infrastructure teams
- End-to-End Demand Planning: Conduct in-depth analysis of usage patterns, growth forecasts, and business requirements at the product level. Translate these insights into platform and infrastructure needs and create comprehensive plans for build/buy strategies and execution
- Champion Cost Visibility and Efficiency: Own cost transparency efforts and drive efficiency improvements across private and public cloud environments, improving gross margin
- Develop TCO Models: Design and maintain Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models for key platform components (e.g., storage, compute) and product surfaces (e.g., FSS, Dash) to support informed decision-making
- Oversee Large-Scale Infrastructure Migrations: Lead projects related to the migration of data and services across private and public cloud environments, ensuring minimal disruption and optimization of cost and performance
- Manage Cross-Functional Relationships: Serve as the primary point of contact with physical infrastructure teams (e.g. supply chain, data centers, network, hardware engineering) and software infrastructure teams (e.g. storage, compute, ML). Collaborate closely with finance and product teams to influence capacity planning and alignment
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- Minimum of 7+ years of hands-on experience in capacity engineering or a related field, focusing on designing, forecasting, and scaling infrastructure to support high-demand, large-scale environments
- Advanced proficiency in SQL and data modeling for analyzing large datasets and generating insights to support capacity planning and infrastructure optimization
- Strong experience in designing and implementing scalable systems and solutions, including storage, compute, and network infrastructure. Ability to architect end-to-end solutions for complex capacity challenges
- Experience with AWS services and architecture, including but not limited to EC2, S3, RDS, and VPC, to support capacity planning and infrastructure management in cloud environments
- Experience in cloud FinOps with strong capabilities in cost modeling, TCO analysis, and cost optimization for cloud and data center environments
Preferred Qualifications
- Strong coding proficiency and experience with data engineering tools (e.g. Airflow, Databricks) to build scalable data pipelines and logging infrastructure to support capacity planning
- Experience managing and optimizing large-scale environments running both private and public cloud infrastructure
- Experience with operations research, mathematical optimization, and applying AI or machine learning to improve capacity planning
Compensation
US Zone 1
This role is not available in Zone 1
US Zone 2
$212,700—$287,700 USD
US Zone 3
$189,000—$255,800 USD
Top Skills
SQL
Similar Jobs at Dropbox
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Consumer Web • Productivity • Software • App development • Data Privacy
The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will design and build large-scale ML systems for Dropbox’s AI search and organization features. Responsibilities include collaborating with teams to deploy models, contributing to technical strategies, and integrating advancements in AI into Dropbox products.
Top Skills:
CC++GoPython
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Consumer Web • Productivity • Software • App development • Data Privacy
As a Senior Backend Product Software Engineer at Dropbox, you'll design and develop AI-powered software applications, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and implement large-scale distributed systems. The role involves optimizing data ingestion processes and mentoring junior engineers, contributing to enhancing reliability and performance of software solutions.
Top Skills:
GoPython
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Consumer Web • Productivity • Software • App development • Data Privacy
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will lead the design and implementation of data architectures to optimize data management and ensure the quality, security, and accessibility of data. You will collaborate with multiple teams to establish data strategies, oversee data processing solutions, develop frameworks, and mentor engineers to support data-driven decision-making within the organization.
Top Skills:
AWSDatabricksHadoopKafkaSpark
What you need to know about the Toronto Tech Scene
Although home to some of the biggest names in tech, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, Toronto has established itself as one of the largest startup ecosystems in the world. And with over 2,000 startups — more than 30 percent of the country's total startups — Toronto continues to attract new businesses. Be it helping entrepreneurs manage their finances, simplifying business operations by automating payroll or assisting pharmaceutical companies in launching new drugs, the city's tech scene is just getting started.
