Role Description
Dropbox’s Design team is looking for a Principal Designer to help define the future of content activation for Dropbox customers. In this role, you will help lead the design vision and execution for Dropbox’s portfolio of products and services.
As a Principal Designer, you will shape how AI helps customers get their jobs done faster, better, and with greater confidence. Dropbox holds the content, context, and collaboration that power our customers’ most important work. This role is about designing AI experiences that activate that content in useful, intuitive, and trustworthy ways, helping customers find clarity, make progress, and take action without adding complexity or friction.
We believe AI should sharpen our customers, not replace their judgment. You will be responsible for creating experiences where AI acts as a thoughtful partner: surfacing what matters, reducing busywork, connecting ideas, and helping people move from information to action, while keeping customers in control. The best experiences will feel elegant, precise, and almost invisible; AI should make Dropbox more powerful without making it feel more complicated.
This role requires a designer with exceptional craft, strong product judgment, and the ability to operate across strategy, systems, and execution. You will translate emerging AI capabilities into high-trust, “it just works” product experiences, while raising the quality bar for the broader design organization. You will also help transform the team into AI-enabled designers, setting new standards for how we use AI in our own design process, how we prototype, how we explore, and how we deliver customer value.
You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, and Design leadership to shape not only what we build, but how we build it. This is a critical role for Dropbox’s AI-first, multi-product future, and for defining the next generation of product experiences that help customers do their best work.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the design vision for Dropbox’s broader multi-product ecosystem that helps customers find, understand, activate, and act on the content already living in Dropbox.
- Design AI-powered experiences that make customers sharper and more effective without replacing their judgment. Ensure AI feels like a trusted partner: reducing friction, surfacing what matters, accelerating decisions, and keeping customers in control.
- Lead ambiguous, high-impact product areas from strategic framing through execution, translating emerging AI capabilities into simple, elegant, high-trust experiences that feel powerful without becoming clunky, noisy, or difficult to use.
- Set an exceptionally high craft bar across interaction design, information architecture, systems thinking, prototyping, content, visual quality, and implementation. Make the product feel precise, coherent, and unmistakably Dropbox.
- Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, and Design leadership to shape strategy, prioritize the highest-impact opportunities, align teams, and drive outcomes with urgency and quality.
- Raise the bar for the design organization by mentoring designers, improving critique, modeling excellent AI product design, and helping the team become more AI-enabled in how they explore, prototype, evaluate, and ship work.
Requirements
- 12+ years of product design experience, with a strong track record leading complex, ambiguous, high-impact product initiatives from vision through launch at scale.
- A portfolio that demonstrates Principal-level craft, product judgment, systems thinking, customer empathy, and the ability to ship experiences that customers understand, trust, and love.
- Exceptional executional range, with the ability to move fluidly from long-term strategy and narrative to detailed flows, interaction models, prototypes, edge cases, content, and implementation quality.
- Proven ability to influence senior cross-functional partners, create alignment through clear storytelling, and drive product direction in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
- Strong ability to translate emerging capabilities into simple, useful, intuitive product experiences that reduce friction, preserve customer agency, and help people get meaningful work done.
- A collaborative, low-ego leadership style, with a track record of mentoring designers, raising standards, improving critique, and helping teams produce better work than they could have produced on their own.
- Experience designing end-to-end experiences across multiple products, surfaces, or platforms, with a strong ability to create coherence across complex user journeys.
- A portfolio that shows a deeply opinionated design sensibility, where the candidate’s taste, principles, and product philosophy are visible in the work itself.
- A demonstrated ability to simplify complex systems, workflows, or mental models into experiences that feel premium, obvious, and easy to use.
- Deep experience designing customer-facing products in emerging or complex domains such as AI, search, knowledge work, productivity, collaboration, enterprise software, or multi-product ecosystems.
- Experience designing or simplifying agentic experiences, agent management, automation, orchestration, permissions, delegation, or similarly complex product metaphors where users need clarity, control, and trust.
- A strong point of view on how AI can augment human judgment, activate customer content, reduce busywork, and make customers sharper without making the experience feel clunky, opaque, or over-automated.
- A strong point of view on design craft in the AI era, including how designers should use AI to increase creativity, speed, quality, and customer understanding.
Durable Skills
AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
- Awareness: Understand yourself and others.
- Judgment: Evaluate information and make decisions in complex situations.
- Adaptability: Learn, adjust, and stay effective through change.
- Connection: Communicate, collaborate, and build trust.
To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.
Compensation