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

How candidates describe it

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