Dropbox
Senior
Senior Storage Infra Engineer at Dropbox — replication, erasure coding, and exabyte-scale distributed storage
This role sits on Dropbox's Storage team, which owns the distributed storage infrastructure storing exabytes of user data across global data centers. The JD requires 9+ years of distributed systems experience plus production coding in C++, Go, or Rust, with day-to-day work in Go and Rust, and explicitly calls out replication, erasure coding, consistency tradeoffs, and on-call ownership of mission-critical services. Preferred background includes object storage systems like S3, Ceph, or GFS/Colossus and deep systems-performance work.
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What this interview tests
- Distributed storage system design: replication, consistency, fault tolerance at exabyte scale
- Erasure coding and data placement algorithm tradeoffs (durability vs. cost vs. performance)
- Production coding and debugging in Go, Rust, or C++
- On-call operations, incident response, and root cause analysis for mission-critical services
- Object storage system experience (S3, Ceph, GFS/Colossus-style systems)
- Systems performance profiling and low-level optimization
Common question themes
Design a replicated, erasure-coded storage system for exabyte-scale data — what tradeoffs do you make
Describe a production incident in a storage or distributed system you resolved, including root cause
Tell me about a hard bug you debugged in Go, Rust, or C++ in a mission-critical service
How do you reason about consistency tradeoffs (e.g., eventual vs. strong) in a storage layer
Walk through a performance optimization you made in a storage or file system
How did you contribute to or evolve the architecture of a large-scale storage system beyond your initial scope