Matthew Braga
speaker
322 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Matthew Braga’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Nowadays, he's the senior director of engineering productivity at Dropbox, which basically means ensuring that the people who build Dropbox have the right tools to do their jobs. That is another reason why I feel like it's the best job that I can have. It's kind of the intersection of reinventing software engineering to do the best thing possible with the agentic workflows right now. But just as important as having the right tools is figuring out which tools they'll need next.
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I'm Matthew Braga, and this is Working Smarter, a podcast from Dropbox about how AI is changing the way we work and get stuff done. So in each episode this season, we've been talking to people at Dropbox about how you build AI that is actually useful and works across all your content and tools.
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We started with context, so all the engineering involved in understanding where you do your work and who you work with and what work matters to you. From there, we dug into chat and search and how you can find things within a video or an audio file by just searching the way you think. And of course, you can't talk about AI without talking about the importance of security, both when building and using these tools. But on today's episode, we're getting a little meta.
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That's Anuradha Agarwal, a director of software engineering, also on the developer productivity team. And together, Uma and Anuradha have been helping Dropboxers reduce friction, move faster, and have more impact with the help of cutting-edge agentic AI tools, including some stuff they built in-house.
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Before you had mentioned this difference between AI-assisted engineering and then agentic engineering, can you tell me a little bit more about the transition between those things? What is the difference and why are we going from one to the next? In the spectrum of AI-assisted versus agentic, AI-assisted means human is always in the control. It still helps you move faster because you are not actually writing the code or doing the activities. AI is doing a lot of things for you.
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There's obviously still a lot of stuff to figure out here. And so I was curious to hear from Anuradha Agarwal about what they've learned so far, about how all of this works in practice and how the work of building software has changed.
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toilsome and difficult to debug. So those are two very recent examples of things that are being built on top of Nova. We've been talking a little bit about this transition from AI-assisted engineering to more of an agentic engineering way of working. And I'm wondering, you know, what have been some of the biggest surprises to you or things that you've kind of noticed as we've moved into this kind of current era and this way of working?
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Maybe you can tell me a little bit about the approach that you're taking to keeping the quality of the output you're getting from Nova and the agents high when people are assigning these kind of small tasks or large tasks. I mean, this might be a bit of an obvious question, but why is that important? Of course, the main reason for quality is always because we need to not lose the trust of our customer. So we want to ensure that we validate everything and we have high quality bars.
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We've been talking a little bit about some of these areas of friction and ways in which we're trying to reduce toil, but even just thinking sort of this bigger picture on like what we're building and how we're building it and the impact for customers. Like what do you want the end result to be?
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Once we break it down and give it to an agent and they can power through it, that would be really sweet. It sort of sounds like you're describing a world as well in which we're able to break down some of these silos between teams by, you know, no longer having to like wait on somebody else to do that migration. You can say like, hey, why don't I use AI to help you do this? Exactly. And it helps us both. Is that correct? That is right. That is right.
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So you have all these tools, you know, both kind of stuff that we're building a house, stuff that's third party that we're bringing in. How are you measuring how people are using these tools to make sure that they're being used the most effectively, that they're getting the results that we want, and that, you know, people are also enjoying using them? I imagine that's a factor. So we have multiple ways to measure things. We are seeing like a dramatic increase in throughput. So that's one measurement.
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There are a lot of AI tools out there, and not all of them are alike. Which is why, throughout this season, we've wanted to take you under the hood of AI at Dropbox, introduce you to some talented folks, and show you how they've been trying to solve some of the most frustrating problems with modern work. And as you've probably gathered, these aren't easy problems to solve.
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They span context engineering, chat, and agentic AI. There's multimodal search and, of course, security. But the scope of this challenge is also a reflection of how teams work today. Because when you have AI that actually understands you, that connects to all your work apps and puts everything in one secure place, you can start to move a little faster and focus on the work that matters most to you.
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That's it for this season of Working Smarter. Thanks for listening. And may you and your team enjoy a smarter way of working. Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work all in one place with context-aware AI from Dropbox. You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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And you can also find more interviews like this one on our website, workingsmarter.ai. Working Smarter would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard, producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Asia Simpson, technical director Jacob Winnick, and executive producer Eliza Smith. Special thanks to our illustrator, Fanny Lohr, and to Megan Ellingboe for marketing support. Our theme song was composed by Doug Stewart, and I'm your host, Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening.
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For the last twenty-six years, basically her whole career, Jessica Menez has been on a mission to make the world and by extension the internet a better, safer place.
That was in 2022, and things have clearly gone pretty well because Jess is now the head of security at Dropbox, where her and her team help protect, secure, and keep work moving for more than 700 million users worldwide.
But what do you do when the world starts to change?
Where once you had files on your desktop, modern work is spread across all these different web apps and tools.
And now that people are sharing this content with AI, sure there's lots of opportunity.
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