Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

IC2 Reliability Engineer

I deliver well-designed, resilient, and sustainable solutions to achieve team-level resilience goals

Scope Area of ownership and level of autonomy / ambiguity

• I execute on defined projects to achieve team-level goals.
• I independently define the right solutions or use existing approaches to solve defined problems.

Collaborative Reach Organizational reach and extent of influence

• I work primarily within the scope of my team with high level guidance from my manager/TL

Impact Levers Technical levers typically exercised to achieve business impact

• Craft - I am increasingly mastering my craft and leverage it for higher impact (e.g. software design)
• Mentorship - I may mentor new hires, interns, or more junior engineers.

🏆 Results

Impact

• I act with urgency and deliver high-quality work that will add the most value
• I work with my manager to direct my focus so my work advances my team's goals
• I prioritize the right things and don't overcomplicate my work. When necessary, I propose appropriate scope adjustments.
• I effectively participate in the core processes of my team, including recommending and implementing process improvements

Ownership

• I follow through on my commitments, take responsibility for my work, and deliver on time
• I proactively identify and advocate for opportunities to improve the current state of projects
• I own my failures and learn from them
• I think a step or two ahead in my work, solve the right problems before they become bigger problems, and problem-solve with my manager when I'm stuck

Decision Making

• I Identify and gather input from others and consider customer needs to make informed and timely decisions

🌟 Direction

Agility

• I’m open to change and enthusiastic about new initiatives
• I work with my manager to navigate complex and ambiguous situations

Innovation

• I ask questions and contribute to new ideas/approaches
• I experiment with new approaches and share what I learned

🌳 Talent

Personal Growth

• I proactively ask for feedback from those I work with and identify ways to act upon it
• I have 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

Talent Development

• I model integrity and a high standard of excellence for my work.
• I help the more junior members of my team, host interns, or am a residency mentor
• I offer honest feedback that is delivered with empathy to help others learn and grow
• I contribute to interviewing and assessing candidates to help us build a diverse and talented team. I am calibrated and consistently perform high-signal interviews
• I am able to represent my team’s initiatives and goals to candidates in a compelling way

🌈 Culture

Collaboration

• I can effectively collaborate to get work done
• I work with my manager to manage conflict with empathy and cooperation in mind

Organizational Health

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

Communication

• I write and speak clearly
• I listen to understand others and ask clarifying questions
• I share relevant information on my projects to my manager, team and customers.

🦉 Craft

My primary craft focus is consistently delivering and improving high-quality systems and code in service of increasing the reliability of Dropbox. I am beginning to develop skills in designing system components and translating reliability, sustainability and efficiency requirements into simple projects.

Systems Fluency

• I understand OS, networks, or hardware and can debug system issues and identify system bottlenecks.

• I am able to understand and improve the system’s health such as utilization and performance.

• I identify the toil and reduce it with automation for operating systems efficiently.
• I can navigate through a full stack application (client/load-balancer/frontend/backend/DB) and build proficiency on the right tools to dig into the system issues at different levels.

Systems Design

• I begin to understand how systems fail and work with teams to reduce the risks.
• I have a pragmatic understanding of software limitations and how to identify reliability risks.

Code Fluency

• I translate ideas into clear code, written to be read as well as executed.
• 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 am able to read and navigate through a large code base and effectively debug others’ code.
• I address code tasks with both high throughput and appropriately high quality for the stage of project I am working on.