Pathrise Guide
How to Get a Job at Dropbox
About this guide
These pages are meant to provide helpful information about how to get a software engineering, product manager, data science, and designer job at Dropbox. Being prepared and knowledgeable is a key to every step of the hiring process. You can tab through each part of the guide to see information that can be helpful to your stage from office location for those trying to figure out if a company has a presence in your city of choice to real world interview questions. These guides contain much of the same information we have Pathrise fellows review before they apply or interview for a job with Dropbox for roles including Software Developer, Mobile Developer, Software Engineer, Web Developer, Software Architect, Computer Programmer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Product Designer, UI Designer, UX Designer, Experience Designer, Web Designer, Product Manager, and Technical Product Manager and other tech, data, and product related roles. We hope you find these helpful and if you have content that you think we should add or think we got anything wrong, please email us at [email protected] and let us know.
- Dropbox is known for their fun and easy-going culture.
- The compensation for these roles is ranked at the very top of the industry.
- There have been some complaints about it being difficult to advance within the company.
- Management has been described as good overall, although sometimes they are too inexperienced and are ineffective.
The entire interview process usually takes about 3 weeks.
Step 1: Phone screen with recruiter, which can include technical questions
Step 2: Online coding test
Step 3 2 technical phone interviews
These questions require the candidate to write code using Coderpad to solve a couple of problems.
Step 4 Onsite interview
The onsite includes 3 engineering interviews, 1 demo session, and an hour-long culture fit interview. It is a combination of technology conversations, whiteboard coding, and system design questions.
The information about the interview process for data scientist at Dropbox is limited.
Stage 1: Technical phone screen with hiring manager
Stage 2: Coding challenge
It seems that the process starts with HR setting a technical phone screening by the hiring manager.
Stage 3: Onsite interview
Candidate presents the coding challenge during the onsite.
On average the entire interview process is done in 2+ weeks.
Step 1: Design challenge
Step 2: Phone interview with a designer
A portfolio review, where the candidate talks about couple of projects from his/her past experience.
Step 3: Onsite interview
The onsite is a full day of interviews, including an hour portfolio review presentation in a room of about 8-10 designers, lunch, 1-on-1s, a coding challenge, some whiteboarding design exercise, and a general chat with the manager.
It can take up to 4 weeks to finish the entire process.
Stage 1: 1 hour phone screen.
Stage 2: Create a presentation of a prior project
Stage 3: Onsite interview.
The onsite includes 4 interviews + lunch: the presentation of the prior project, behavioral questions, product intuition, and a design exercise. The PM questions are very design heavy, so one needs to be prepared to draw and write on the whiteboard and discuss the trade-offs of different products.
- Questions about lists and sums of elements of the list
- Locate certain types of words in a dictionary
- Given a pattern and a string - find if the string follows the same pattern (Eg: Pattern: [a b b a], String: cat dog dog cat)
- Finding the duplicate files of the same root folder.
- Design a link shortening URL system. Discuss the tradeoffs of different approaches.
- Write a basic file system and implement the commands ls, pwd, mkdir, create, rm, cd, cat, mv.
- Write a program that logs hits received in the past 15 minutes.
- "Make a program that can print out the text form of numbers from 1 - 1000 (ex. 20 is "twenty", 105 is "one hundred and five").
- Find the sum to a target in an array
- You have a number of meetings (with their start and end times). You need to schedule them using the minimum number of rooms. Return the list of meetings in every room.
- Design an LRU cache. It's a data structure with a capacity. Beyond this capacity the least recently used item is removed. You should be able to insert an element, access an element given its key, and delete an element, in constant time. Note that when you access an element, even if it's just for a read, it becomes the most recently used.
- How would you redo a specific UI?
- Given the output from the first question, write an algorithm to calculate how many possible inputs could have created that output. For example, "1211" could be interpreted as one two and one one || one hundred and twenty one one.
- Solve a software routine problem
- Infix -> postfix expression conversion and evaluation.
- Given an array of integers eg [1,2,-3,1] find whether there is a subsequence that sums to 0 and return it (eg 1,2,-3 or 2,-3,1).
- Design a spell-checking algorithm.
- Program a web crawler, then make it multithreaded.
- Implement a function that searches a file system for files with identical contents.
- How to design a web counter that returns number of visitors in last 5 mins.
- Find all duplicate files by content in your filesystem.
- Implement a class registration system.
- Do you know what propensity modeling is?
- How would you set up a propensity model for the SMB team looking at companies between 5-200 employees?
- How would you sell to a customer?
- What is your design process?
- What was the biggest takeaway from your current job that you'll carry with you throughout your career?
- What is the project you are most proud of?
- How do you rate your skills in product thinking, interaction design, and visual design?
- What led you to your final design? Describe the tradeoffs you considered.
- Do you have more illustrations for your final design?
- Design a car stereo for a car rental company
- What does it mean to store something? Is it a natural tendency of people?
- What is your design super power?
- What considerations would you take to develop a mobile app?
- What are your favorite products and what would you track and change?
- How do you align stakeholders that have different options when you get into a project?
- Design a flow to improve the amount of users who add files to their account.
- Design a new car stereo.
- Choose your favorite product. How would you improve it?
- How do you work with people? How did you measure success?
- What are the positives and negatives of Dropbox?
- Name a favorite product.
- Name your 3 favorite software programs and how would you improve them?
Mission
We're here to unleash the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.
Be worthy of trust Take care of each other and our users, and keep their best interests at heart. Millions of people and businesses trust us to safeguard their most important information. We strive to be as transparent as possible with them and each other.
Sweat the details
Obsess over quality and strive to master your craft. We believe that truly insightful solutions emerge from a deep understanding of problems and a dedication to iteration. We push ourselves (and each other) to get to the root of problems, and we don't accept sloppy solutions or band-aids (temporary fixes).
Aim Higher
Set audacious goals. We believe in taking risks and being willing to disrupt ourselves, so we don't squander an opportunity to build something much bigger. With the density of incredible talent at Dropbox and the size of the opportunity in front of us, we owe it to each other to push limits.
We, not I
We're a village, and as members, we each need to do our part for the village to thrive. We tackle a never-ending stream of people, product, and business challenges, many of which are far too hard to be solved by a single person or team. We believe in people really knowing each other and in putting the welfare of Dropbox and our users before ourselves.
Cupcake
Surprise and delight each other and our users. Cupcake is about adding an authentic, human touch to everything we do. But more than that, it's about finding creative ways to make our users (and each other) smile whether it's our quirky illustrations, or bringing a roving ice cream cart to the office to celebrate a product launch. We believe that the magic we create together as Dropboxers translates into magic for our users.
- San Francisco: 333 Brannan Street
- Hamburg: 69 Am Kaiserkai
- Dublin: One Park Place, Hatch Street Upper, Saint Kevin's
- Mountain View: 200 W Evelyn Ave
- Austin: 501 Congress Ave
- Tokyo: 1 Chome-6-5 Marunouchi, Chiyoda
- Sydney: 5 Martin Pl
- Seattle: 701 5th Ave
- San Francisco: 333 Brannan
- New York: 9th Street
- London: Riding House st
- Paris: 12 Champs Elysees
- Herzliya: Sderot Abba Eban 8