One of the choicest global productivity tools for storing, sorting, sharing, and sending documents in real-time, Dropbox wants to contribute to the future of work by making it fast, secure, and affordable to streamline workflow and sync files. So when it collaborated with Slack, a workplace communication software, to launch an apprenticeship program for underserved individuals in the United States, it reaffirmed its mission to design a more enlightened way of working.
As an emerging tech professional looking to start or restart a career in software engineering, the Dropbox apprenticeship program, formerly IGNITE, offers a supportive environment for you to thrive. If you’re ready to scale your tech career, read this article to the end. We’ve highlighted essential details about the Dropbox software engineering apprenticeship track, Dropbox’s salary range and benefits, its apprenticeship conversion rate, tips for preparing for your Dropbox apprenticeship interview, and Dropbox’s apprenticeship reviews.
Dropbox is a smart workspace that offers a secure cloud storage mobile and desktop software application for creating, organizing, filing, syncing, sharing, and collaborating on essential documents across multiple devices. Dropbox also offers branded products that allow registered users to request and add signatures, backup files, send and transfer documents, and screen record or create video messages. As of September 2022, Dropbox has a 27.6% global market share in the file-sharing software market, making it the world's second-most-used file-sharing tool.
According to the statistical data, Google Drive holds the number one spot. Although Dropbox became a virtual-first organization in October 2020, it leases a headquarters in Mission Bay, San Francisco, California. In addition, the company has three other permanent locations in Dublin, New York, Washington D.C., Austin, and Seattle. It has 3,118 full-time employees, of which 2,583 are within the United States. As per its last Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) report in 2021, 39% of its workforce were female, and 12% were underrepresented minorities.
For the fiscal year 2022, Dropbox generated $2.325 billion in revenue, averaging a 7.7% year-on-year increase on a constant currency basis. The company has over 700 million registered users across more than 180 countries. At the close of December 2022, Dropbox recorded 17.77 million paying customers and 575,000 paying business teams.
In the Summer of 2007, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded a revolutionary digital storage application service for Mac and Windows operating systems. The idea for Dropbox came three months after Drew finished his M.B.A. from Phi Delta Theta. After Drew forgot his USB memory stick, he created an application to sync his files over the web. Drew met with Paul Graham from Y Combinator and raised funding for his startup four months later.
However, Graham insisted he had a co-founder before proceeding with his application. Within a two-week deadline, Drew found Arash, a computer science major at MIT. Together they received $15,000 from Y Combinator, enough to rent an apartment and purchase a Mac Laptop. Their second funding, $1.2 million, came from Sequoia. The founders made Dropbox publicly available with only nine employees in September 2008 and garnered about 20,000 registered users. The founders started working on extending Dropbox’s capabilities to become a multi-device cloud storage service following a $6 million Series A funding from Sequoia Capital in November 2008.
They launched the iPhone app in September 2009, and the Android app, iPad app, and mobile APIs followed in April 2010. After a failed attempt by Steve Jobs to acquire Dropbox, Apple launched iCloud in June 2011. The same year, the company launched Dropbox for Teams. Its employee base had also grown to 70. In October 2011, Dropbox received $250 million in Series B funding from Index Ventures, reaching a $4 billion market capitalization. By 2012, Dropbox users had grown to 100 million. To date, it has earned $1.7 billion in total funding.
By the close of 2017, Dropbox became the fastest SaaS company to cross the $1 billion revenue run rate without an IPO. On the 15th of February 2018, the company announced the launch of the Dropbox Foundation, which focuses on defending human rights by partnering with impactful nonprofits to provide unrestricted grants and skilled-based volunteering.
On March 22nd, 2018, the company announced its initial public offering of 36,000,000 shares of its common stock for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under “DBX.” Dropbox priced each share at $21, giving the company an initial market valuation of $8 billion. However, the company stock opened at $29 and closed at $28.48 on Thursday, the 23rd of March, making its debut the largest since Snapchat. At the year's close, it had 12.7 million paying customers and generated $1.391 billion in revenue. As of 2022, Dropbox had purchased 29 organizations, including HelloSign, DocSend, and FormSwift,
In 2017, Dropbox was named market leader in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms. In addition, between 2021 and 2023, Dropbox received accolades from top brands like Aragon Research, G2, Fast Company, Built In, Fortune, Forbes, and Great Place to Work for being a remote-first, innovative, and supportive workplace for all kinds of employees, including parents.
Dropbox is on a mission to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.
The core values of this virtual first company define its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Dropbox offers a tailored range of branded work-optimization and collaboration tools to individuals and teams across the globe. Ninety percent of Dropbox’s revenue comes from its self-service channels. As of December 2022, Dropbox has five signature products: Dropbox, Dropbox Sign, Dropbox Backup, DocSend, and Dropbox Capture.
Prospective customers can use these branded products and their modern features through Dropbox’s six pricing plans: Plus, Family, Professional, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. The company also generates revenue from Dropbox Shop, e-commerce for artists and merchants to sell digital products such as printables, audio files, and plugins.
According to Stackshare, Dropbox has 26 technologies in its tech stack. To state clearly, the company uses seven application and data tools, five utilities, five DevOps, and nine business tools.
Dropbox’s application and data tools include Python, MySQL, Amazon CloudFront, Memcached, NGINX, Amazon S3, Ruby, Rails, and Rust. Framer, Google Analytics, Bugcrowd, App Annie, and HackerOne, are some of its utilities. Dropbox DevOps are HAProxy, Sentry, Nagios, Pingdom, and Phabricator. The business tools are as follows: Zendesk, Asana, Slack, Balsamiq, Dropbox Paper, Google Suite, and OneLogin.
Dropbox launched the first apprenticeship program, Ignite, in 2016 with three site reliability engineering apprentices who converted to full-time engineers at the end of the program. However, the apprenticeship program was rebranded and relaunched in October 2018 with eight apprentices. The company later renamed the apprenticeship “The Dropbox Apprenticeship Program.” The goal for the program remained to reimagine the future of work by creating alternative entry paths for individuals from unconventional backgrounds looking to launch or relaunch their tech careers.
As part of its efforts to create alternative paths to technology careers and tackle justice reform issues, Dropbox partnered with Slack’s Next Chapter in 2020 to provide workforce training to formerly incarcerated community members looking to break into engineering roles. This program offers these apprentices on-the-job training, financial support, professional mentorship, reentry services, and potential full-time employment at Dropbox.
The Dropbox apprenticeship is a five-month paid engineering apprenticeship program. Apprentices are placed in different engineering teams across the company. Each unit has a dedicated mentor and manager. These managers and mentors provide one-on-one feedback to apprentices.
Apprentices also have regular meetings with their managers and peer mentors. They must also attend monthly learning and development sessions and social events alongside their apprentices and senior colleagues. At the end of the program, each candidate has an equal opportunity to transition seamlessly to a full-time role at Dropbox.
This apprenticeship program is for candidates looking to launch careers as software engineers. As a Dropbox apprentice, you'll update web pages, contribute to codebases, write automated tests, review multiple lines of code, and troubleshoot bugs.
Apprentices may work on beginner projects such as creating a photo editor for iOS, fixing iOS apps to cancel flow issues, creating a frontend module on the Dropbox Paper landing page, and building feature toggles for existing products. Apprentices are encouraged to ask questions and learn directly from advanced engineers. For workflow, apprentices may use GitHub, Jira, Phabricator, and Asana.
Dropbox has a 77% apprenticeship conversion rate. Between 2016 and 2022, 48 apprentices have passed through its apprenticeship pipeline, and 37 have converted to full-time employees across various engineering teams, including activation platform, channel experience, filesystem, capacity engineering, integrations, platform delivery, mobile expansion, team expansion, and Hardware.
Like most top tech companies, Dropbox pays an impressive salary. However, for internal reasons, the company keeps the exact compensation rate apprentices earn during the program a secret. Nonetheless, Glassdoor reviews show that software engineering apprentices at Dropbox earn an average of $13,788 monthly. The figure covers $9,480 as base pay and $4,308 as additional pay.
Besides a sizable compensation, technical mentorships, invitations to social events, and learning and development programs, Dropbox software engineering apprentices have access to quarterly perk allowances, flexible & remote work, paid time off, paid holidays, volunteer time off, free Dropbox space, access to employee resource groups, tech talks, and medical, dental, and vision benefits as a U.S.-based candidate.
Dropbox Apprenticeship Selection: How Are Cohorts Chosen?
Candidates chosen for the apprenticeship program are usually coding bootcamp graduates, self-taught programmers, veterans, and career switchers who don't own a computer science degree. While some Dropbox apprentices never attended college, others came from disciplines and fields such as financial services, pharmacy & health care, videography, microbiology, and chemical engineering.
In the past, apprentices have graduated from coding bootcamps such as HackReactor, General Assembly, App Academy, and Hackbright Academy. Dropbox has no demands on having prior software engineering work experience. However, you must reside in the United States or Canada and be ready to complete the apprenticeship program and possibly resume your full-time entry-level position within the allotted time.
Dropbox Apprenticeship Program Interview: Is the Dropbox Interview Hard?
According to reviews on Glassdoor, the Ignite apprenticeship interviews at Dropbox have a 3.5 difficulty rating. To win an interview at Dropbox, you must submit an online application that includes an application cover letter detailing your passion for the field, your interest and potential contribution to Dropbox, and your personal coding journey. In addition, you'll need to create a free Dropbox account and a Zoom account. Following a timely review, an Emerging Talent recruiter will contact you to participate in two technical assessments prepared by CodeS signal. Dropbox usually sends a preparatory guide before the interview process begins.
The first round is CodeSignal’s General Coding Assessment. If you’ve taken the test before, you can skip this stage by sharing your score with Dropbox. This 70-minute test uses four leet code tasks, graded by difficulty level, to measure your application and problem-solving skills. If you succeed, Dropbox will send you another 90-minute CodeSignal object-oriented assessment containing seven tasks developed by Dropbox engineers. In addition, you’ll be expected to complete one of seven tasks on popular object-oriented programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, C++, Java, and Typescript.
Dropbox also expects candidates to complete a 20-minute non-technical phone screening with a recruiter after the assessments. This interview evaluates your work experience, goals, and interest in launching a software engineering career at Dropbox. Dropbox will also invite successful candidates to complete three to four final rounds of code review, algorithm questions, and behavioral interviews to evaluate their overall knowledge of software engineering.
Each interview may span 50 minutes. You may encounter topics on automated product testing, data structures, programming languages & frameworks, code review best practices, and algorithms. You may also complete another non-technical interview where you’ll disclose your past projects. Successful candidates will receive offers to resume virtually at a specific date.
Each cohort usually comprises eight apprentices. However, Dropbox may hire as many as 12 apprentices per cohort. As of October 2022, Dropbox had recruited 48 apprentices into six cohorts. However, as a part of the New Chapter organization committed to redirecting ex-convicts to lucrative tech careers, Dropbox also recruits apprentices from the shared cohorts. In 2020, when Dropbox began its partnership with Next Chapter, the non-profit recruited eight apprentices for all three companies: Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox.
Dropbox Apprenticeship Cohort Frequency: How Often is a Cohort Hired?
Dropbox usually recruits new cohorts during the Spring and Fall of each year. In the Fall of 2022, the Emerging Talent team welcomed its sixth cohort of apprentices. As usual, Dropbox will receive its 7th cohort in 2023, although the company still needs to release specifics about the program dates and timeline.
You can prepare for the next cohort using the previous hiring timeline. Applications opened on July 18 and ended on the 22nd. Application reviews and interviews take place in July/August. Dropbox offers interview workshops for candidates who make it to the final interview rounds, which take place in August/September. Offers and assumptions take place in September.
Yes, Dropbox is an excellent company to work for if you're interested in collaborating with others to redefine the future of work and improve productivity in others. According to employee reviews from Glassdoor, Dropbox has a 4.6 out of five-star rating for offering great benefits, a supportive team, reasonable compensation, virtual work, and diversity efforts. Ninety-three percent of reviewers agree to recommend Dropbox to a friend, and 93% approve of the CEO.
The Dropbox apprenticeship hiring process may span eight weeks (two months). During this period, prospective candidates must submit their application, wait for it to be reviewed, be prepped for the interviews, complete the two rounds of coding assessments, participate in a phone screening, and attend three to four final games of interviews. Within the same period, the apprentice can expect an offer to resume the apprenticeship later.
Is the Dropbox interview difficult?
Yes, Dropbox interviews may be difficult if you have not prepared specifically for them beyond what you were taught in your bootcamp or online technical courses. Most topics you may encounter during your interviews span system designs, algorithms, data structures, code reviews, and automated testing. You should visit tutorial sites to familiarize yourself with technical discussions and practice some core tasks before your interview date.
First off, you should go into the interview with high expectations. The meeting will test your commitment to a career in technology. It will also test the depth of your technical knowledge and cultural fit. However, Dropbox tries to limit surprises for candidates by hosting apprenticeship workshops to help candidates prepare for hiring. At the end of each interview, you should expect feedback. You can also initiate feedback work with your interviewer or hiring panel during the interviews to understand your chances of succeeding at the company.
To know more about Dropbox’s work culture, company news, engineering employee routine and engagements, software engineering tech stack, new products and features, and former apprentices’ stories and statistics, you should visit the Dropbox Careers and the Dropbox Blog pages.
You should visit the Dropbox DEI page to learn more about Dropbox's commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
You can get news about the Dropbox apprenticeship program’s timeline and interview process from the Dropbox Emerging Talent page.
If you don’t want to track and monitor the Dropbox apprenticeship program for yourself or are looking for support in an apprenticeship application, you can join apprenticeship.io to learn more and get support to land an apprenticeship program.
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