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Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
Overview
What is Impact?

Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

What’s a Career Framework?

The Engineering Career Framework is your source for how to achieve impact for your role and team and how to grow in your engineering career. For managers, it can help you set expectations with your teams and hold them accountable for their work.

What the Career Framework is not

This framework is not a promotion checklist for your role; rather, it’s designed to help you figure out what your impact could look like at the next level.

This framework is not an exhaustive list of examples and behaviors; each responsibility includes three to four key behaviors that serve as guide for how to think about your work. Consequently, you’ll need to meet with your manager to define your impact goals and align on the expectations for your role.

What’s in a Career Framework?

This framework is broken down into two components:

  • Level Expectations define the scope, collaborative reach, and levers for impact at every level; these expectations are the what that determines the difference between an IC3 and IC4, for example
  • Core and Craft Responsibilities define the key behaviors specific to your role and team; these behaviors help you identify how you work to deliver impact based on your level expectations

How to navigate this framework

Dropbox measures the success of its engineers largely on business impact. Anchor your work first and foremost on creating long-term impact. Since impact can be a bit vague, read What is Impact?

Next, ground yourself in the expectations for your level and team. For each level, you’ll find a one-line summary description and the role’s scope, collaborative reach, and levers for impact.

Review the expected behaviors for that level across the Results, Direction, Talent, Culture pillars from the Core Responsibilities. Read your Craft expectations, which are the per discipline technical capabilities you need to master at that level. Finally, meet with your manager to set your goals for the quarter.



Guideline Version: v2.9.1