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Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

IC1 Machine Learning Engineer

I deliver lots of high quality production-ready code with direction from the team

Scope Area of ownership and level of autonomy / ambiguity

  • I execute on defined tasks and contribute to solving problems with defined solutions.

Collaborative Reach Organizational reach and extent of influence

  • I work within the scope of my team with specific guidance from my manager/TL

Impact Levers Technical levers typically exercised to achieve business impact

  • Craft - I primarily focus on improving my craft as an engineer

🏆 Results

Impact

  • I work with my manager to prioritize tasks that add the most value and deliver high-quality results for my customer
  • I understand and effectively participate in the core processes of my team (planning, on-call rotations, bug triage, metrics review, etc)
  • With guidance from my manager, and Tech lead, I deliver high-quality work on time that adds the most value for the customer and our business

Ownership

  • I follow through on my commitments, take responsibility for my work, and deliver my work on time
  • I ask questions to clarify expectations
  • I own my decisions and mistakes and learn from them
  • I contribute with urgency to operational issues (e.g., SEVs), leveraging my strengths to help find resolution
  • I raise concerns when I am suspicious that there has been a regression in service, and I advocate for declaring a SEV if a problem is found

Decision Making

  • I escalate to my manager when I get stuck and need help with a decision concerning my deliverables or priorities

🌟 Direction

Agility / Innovation

  • I can adapt my work when circumstances change
  • I find new and creative ways to accomplish my work, and share my ideas with the team

🌳 Talent

Personal Growth

  • I'm open to and act upon feedback from my manager and peers
  • I'm gaining self-awareness about my strengths and areas for development
  • I drive discussions with my manager about aspirational goals and seek out opportunities to learn and grow (e.g. PGP, Dropbox-offered training, leveraging perks allowance).

Team Development

  • I model integrity and have a high standard of excellence for my work
  • I am learning to interview and assess candidates to help us build a diverse and talented team. I consistently provide timely, detailed, and evidence-based interview feedback.
  • I am able to represent my team’s initiatives and goals to candidates in a compelling way

🌈 Culture

Collaboration

  • I can effectively collaborate and adopt necessary tools (e.g., pair programming) that adapts to virtual first and get work done
  • I work with my manager to engage in productive conflict with thoughtful questioning and have the courage to state my point of view
  • I promote and role model Dropbox core values

Organizational Health

  • I listen to different perspectives and I remove biases from my words and actions
  • I contribute to a positive sense of community on my team (e.g., engage in team activities, offsites, and new-hire onboarding)
  • I practice the Dropbox Diversity Commitments on a regular basis

Communication

  • I write and speak with clarity and focus
  • I listen to understand others and ask clarifying questions
  • I proactively share relevant information on my project including difficult task-level trade-offs that impact the product to my manager and team (including product/business partners).

🦉 Craft

I focus on learning the fundamentals of ML and how to apply them to business problems.

ML Fluency

  • I work on ML models by adapting existing tutorials/guides for new purposes.
  • I can analyze and present datasets or results of experiments, with simple methods.

ML Design

  • I apply existing tools and libraries from my team to advance my project.
  • I understand the reasoning behind my team’s design decisions to verify and debug implementations of the designs.

Code Fluency

  • I translate ideas into clear code, written to be read as well as executed
  • I participate in code reviews and raise questions to help me learn the codebases and technologies relevant to my work
  • My code is free of glaring errors - bugs are in edge cases or design, not mainline paths - and is well documented and well tested with appropriate use of manual vs automated tests
  • I’m capable of reading and navigating functions and classes/modules that I didn’t write
  • I am learning to tackle coding tasks with high throughput while maintaining appropriately high quality; I optimize for either speed or quality, depending on the explicitly stated needs of my team