Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

IC3 Quality Engineer

I independently identify and deliver software solutions through a set of milestones spanning a specific product focus or a multi-component system

Scope Area of ownership and level of autonomy / ambiguity

• I own and deliver projects in service of quarterly goals on the team
• I independently identify the right solutions to solve ambiguous, open-ended problems

Collaborative Reach Organizational reach and extent of influence

• I work primarily with my direct team and cross-functional partners while driving cross-team collaboration for my project

Impact Levers Technical levers typically exercised to achieve business impact

• Project Leadership - I define and deliver well-scoped milestones for a project. I may be a technical lead for projects on my team
• Product Expertise - I actively keep customer needs in mind and leverage input from product stakeholders as available to determine the right technical solutions to deliver customer value quickly
• Mentorship - I actively level up less-experienced members of my team by helping them with their craft, providing guidance, and setting a good example

🏆 Results

Impact

• I deliver some of my team’s goals on time and with a high standard of quality
• I understand my customers, the business’s goals and my team’s goals. I ensure my work will have the greatest customer impact
• I can identify when my results aren’t moving the needle for our business/team goals or serving the needs of customers in a meaningful way and work with manager to redirect my focus
• I get work to a simple place by focusing on the heart of the problem and prioritizing the right things

Ownership

• I proactively identify new opportunities and advocate for and implement improvements to the current state of projects
• I take responsibility for my decisions and any failures on my project and take action to prevent them in the future. I embrace and share the learnings from those failures
• When I encounter barriers, I unblock myself and my team by proactively assessing and eliminating the root cause
• I respond with urgency to operational issues (e.g., SEVs), owning resolution within my sphere of responsibility
• I actively seek out and eliminate sources of toil on the team and help reduce the impact of KTLO and SEVs
• I am unafraid of declaring a SEV when needed
• I proactively create and/or update playbooks for components I own

Decision Making

• I make informed decisions by consulting the right stakeholders and balancing details with the big picture. I execute against the spirit, and not just the letter, of the requirements
• I understand the implications of my decisions and adjust my approach based on the impact and risk in the short and long-term
• I make timely decisions and don’t cut corners that would compromise my customer’s trust
• When possible I leverage customer insights/data to inform decisions, balancing value for the customer with other business goals
• I escalate to my manager when I need help with a decision about my deliverables or priorities

🌟 Direction

Agility

• I embrace change and adapt quickly to it
• I’m able to navigate ambiguity and remain resilient through ups and downs by staying calm under pressure and taking care of my overall well-being
• I navigate ambiguity by focusing on the greater purpose, goals, and desired impact to move forward one step at a time

Innovation

• I ask questions and contribute to new ideas/approaches
• I have a growth mindset and am comfortable experimenting with new approaches, learning, owning the outcomes, and sharing what I learned
• I work with my manager to find new ways of utilizing customer feedback to influence our teams' plans

Strategy

• I work collaboratively with my manager to set realistic and ambitious short-term goals to deliver customer value quickly and break these goals down into smaller projects for my team or myself
• I execute the development roadmap for multi-phase projects, possibly as a project lead

🌳 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 connect with others with empathy and understanding
• 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 etc.)

Team Development

• I model integrity and a high standard of excellence for my work. I leverage this to influence and establish best practices
• I support the growth of my teammates by taking into account their skills, backgrounds and working styles
• I actively look for opportunities to mentor new hires, interns and apprentices
• I solicit and offer honest and constructive feedback that is delivered with empathy to help others learn and grow
• I actively contribute to interviewing and assessing candidates to help us build a diverse and talented team by conducting more advanced domain-specific and leveling interviews
• I am able to represent my team’s initiatives and goals to candidates in a compelling way

🌈 Culture

Collaboration

• I build relationships across teams and help get to positive outcomes
• I engage in productive conflict with thoughtful questioning and have the courage to state my point of view
• I proactively communicate and coordinate my team’s requirements with other groups and teams in engineering
• I am capable of working with cross-functional stakeholders to identify technical blindspots and clarify ambiguity in their ideas
• I avoid blame and solve the right problems, disagreeing and committing when necessary to move decisions forward
• I promote and role model Dropbox core values

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 help foster effective communication across the team and promote inclusive meeting culture
• I practice the Dropbox Diversity Commitments on a regular basis
• I champion good virtual first practices that help my team collaborate effectively
• I help shape the Dropbox engineering culture through my involvement with activities outside of my team (e.g. presenting tech talks, participating in Eng RFCs, creating interview questions, planning hackweek)

Communication

• I tailor my message to my audience, presenting it clearly and concisely at the right altitude
• I proactively share information so my manager, team and stakeholders are informed and aligned
• I set the right expectation with my manager to balance my work and mentorship requirements
• If there is a significant issue not being addressed, I initiate a crucial conversation even when uncomfortable

🦉 Craft

Software Design

• With my solid understanding of existing designs and technology choices within my scope (ex: specific initiative with more than one component/feature) of work, I am able to successfully advocate for non-functional requirements such as maintainability, testability, and usability during the software design phase of the PDLC.
• Script development (ex: command-line scripts) are a consistent part of my quality approach and are written using industry standard best practices.

Architecture Design

• I’m able to decompose a complex problem or business scenario and understand how software components interact with each other. My understanding of system architecture is evident in the quality practices I deploy.

Quality Engineering Fluency

• I specialize in a software engineering domain (ex: Full Stack Web, Front-end, Back-end, Mobile) and have a strong awareness of the ecosystem of tools and libraries that support this domain. This includes a strong grasp of the idioms and patterns of my domain expertise. I may be intimately familiar with the open source community surrounding it.
• I create and deploy quality practices that are appropriately flexible, reusable, efficient, and adaptable to changing requirements
• I develop and deploy quality practices that captures the essential nature of the solution and is appropriately flexible, reusable, efficient, and adaptable to changing requirements.
• I ensure high code quality in features I evaluate. I adopt approaches (e.g., set up best practices and help resolve differences of opinions) to foster an effective/collaborative culture.
• I build tools and produce technical documentation to improve developer efficiency and drive alignment within my team.
• I look for ways to reduce future toil and tech debt for existing components my team owns.
• I am able to independently design quality management approaches in well scoped scenarios, with simplicity and maintenance as key considerations. My approaches are repeatable, focused, and offer the necessary levels of transparency.
• I’m able to decompose problems or business scenarios into quality management solutions composed of both manual and automated components interacting with each other
• I proactively identify issues with technical dependencies of my project that are owned by other teams and surface them
• I effectively engage with cross-functional partners to remain in alignment on the needs of our customers and overall business goals. I use this information to inform how/when/where I deploy my quality practices.

Quality Assessment

• I am hyper-focused on delivering risk-driven quality management solutions that are founded in quality metrics/measurements I gather and report to my QE team and cross-functional partners.
• I actively advocate for inclusion on quality metrics/measurements in my QE teams reporting that represent both industry best practices and a deep understanding of my engineering domain (ex: Full Stack, FE, BE, Mobile) and how it is represented within my scope of work

Test Automation & Infrastructure

• I am able to execute automation scripts and advocate in detail for testing tools to be developed that will support both quality process efficiency and developer productivity.
• I identify manual test cases that make for ideal automation candidates and partner with SDET’s to have these scripts developed and included in the CI/CD pipeline
• I make sure that automation script development and execute is included in the “Definition of done” and focus on removing redundancy in manual test execution

Business Acumen

• I engage in listening sessions (All Hands, Quarterly Business Updates, etc.) to increase my learning and guide my work/priorities
• I have a working knowledge of Dropbox’s org/team structure and how teams work together across Dropbox, and able to independently work with partner engineering teams to unblock code reviews, and engineering designs