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Dropbox seeking iOS and Android engineers
on May 10, 2012 | hide
If you've been following Dropbox for a while, you know that we've always tried to keep it simple -- in reality, the stuff under the hood is pretty complicated. Sometimes creating "simple" is pretty hard. Over the past couple years, we've had a handful of brilliant minds craft the thousands of moving parts that make up Dropbox, while keeping it easy enough for your grandma to use. 50 million people around the world now rely on us to save more than 1 billion of their files every 48 hours.

Our small (just 2 engineers on iOS, 3 on Android) but mighty mobile engineering team cares deeply about providing a simple and effortless user experience. We sweat the details of our visual and interaction designs, working closely with our PMs and designers to craft our features and user flows. We're looking for engineers who care deeply about creating a great user experince.

We've got a ton of work ahead of us, and the efforts we put in over the coming months will represent a major shift in how users engage with Dropbox on mobile devices. We'll be rethinking the mobile Dropbox experience in big ways:

- Rebuilding Dropbox for mobile devices as the main use case for Dropbox

- Building out entirely new ways to experience the data in your Dropbox on mobile devices

- Make mobile Dropbox an essential part of users' collaborative workflow

- Simple, effortless sharing with users' friends and colleagues

The Mobile Team at Dropbox works on some pretty challenging technical issues to provide a simple and responsive experience to users of our iOS and Android clients. For a service like Dropbox that prides itself on seamlessly moving your (potential large and numerous) files effortlessly between devices, the constraints of mobile devices loom large -- limited bandwidth, high network latency, bad connectivity, end user cost per KB for mobile data plans, limited device memory, persistent storage, and background execution limitations, all mean making Dropbox a success on mobile devices require a different approach than we use on the desktop.

Here are a few of the technical challenges we've tackled:

- Automatically & efficiently scan and upload users' photos and videos from their devices' cameras

- Smartly pre-fetch data to heat up the cache for responsive user experience despite high latency involved in SSL connection setup on cellular data connections

- Opportunistically reduce file fidelity for a more response experience on high latency/low bandwidth connections where users often pay by the KB

Interested? Send your resume and a little info to: will+jobs@dropbox.com




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