I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Dropbox (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2015
Interview
Received an email saying Dropbox saw my resume at a Hackathon and was interested in pursuing candidacy. I was sent a coding challenge to do online (I generally value NDAs, so I can't say, but it's for sure a question that was already posted to this site in other interview reviews), took an hour and a half and was more of a "build-from-scratch" kind of thing rather than a tough algorithms puzzle. I got 18/18 on it, and was emailed two days later to set up a phone interview.
Phone interview, was asked a variation of the counting change problem, I wasn't quite able to code it up. Got the denial a few days later, as expected. Everyone was very nice and friendly, had a great chat with the interviewer also. I'd recommend giving this company a shot, there was NOT kool-aid at all like at most companies; just genuine engineers who seemed to want to hire great talent.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Coding challenge with basic OOP concepts (encapsulation, testing).
(VARIATION OF:) Given a set of possible change, such as {1, 5, 10, 25}, and an amount such as 13, return all possible ways you can give change back to someone.
I applied online. I interviewed at Dropbox in Apr 2026
Interview
take home OA, two technical rounds, system design and wrap up call with hiring manager. Very transparent, recruiter is there for you describing process in detail, they really want you to get hired
I did OA and phone screen. During the phone screen, the HR did not ask too much questions about myself and mainly spent time talking about next steps. And then ghost me from there. This is not a good interview experience and a timely feedback or reject would be much better.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe yourself and what is your goal in your new job
Initial coding exam with extreme difficulty, leetcode type exam with a time limit. After that you progress to an onsite interview with system design questions. The initial coding exam has about 3 multistep questions.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Dropbox with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 45% positive. To compare, the company-average is 46.9% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 18 days to get hired, when considering 232 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Dropbox overall takes an average of 21 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Dropbox as a Software Engineer according to 232 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 41%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 16%
Presentation: 10%
Background check: 3%
Group panel interview: 3%
Personality test: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Other: 1%
Drug test: 0%
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