How the people building AI at Dropbox use AI themselves
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What is the role of the senior director of engineering productivity at Dropbox?
So I think I'm actually living the dream, to be honest. And the reason I say that is software is always my passion. This is Uma Namasivayam. I used to work in oil and gas and manufacturing, and I was the only one who understood software really, really well. So I was like the unicorn there. Okay, here is this guy who's coming in with the software, building all these dashboards for people to make their works better. So that kind of fueled my thing about, okay, there is a need for software in every different single place that is possible.
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.
2025 AI was more of a productivity tool where it was helping me build code faster. 2026 and 2027 and beyond, it's going to be a complete transformation of how workflows are getting done. So the team is very much focused on how we make sure every engineer in the company right now is actually using AI responsibly and also making their best possible work in the company right now through the use of AI.
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. 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.
The world around us is moving really, really fast. What was hype today becomes reality in a week. And then there's another hype that starts again, right? So you need to be really, really ahead of the curve in understanding what's happening in the market. And talking to Dropboxers about how they use AI to build AI. You kind of give the plan to the AI. And the agents can orchestrate themselves to go and actually solve all these problems and eventually come to you with the final result.
Many engineers have had that aha moment where something that was not possible before is actually working. It actually gives you something, one shot, you get an output which you could not get before.
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.
We want to move with speed. That is going to be the key. Speed is going to be the essence here, right? The ultimate goal that we want to go after is can we actually ship products faster to our customer? And NOVA is a platform that we're actually building internally, which can automate a lot of things that developers are doing.
Given how much code is being produced, the job is changing from writing code to reviewing code. So that is definitely a bottleneck, and this is something we are actually actively working on. In other words, AI isn't just transforming the way we work, but also the way we write the software that people use for work. So what does that transformation look like at Dropbox? That's coming up next on this episode of Working Smarter.
So if you think about software engineering and how a developer is actually using the tools today, think of it as like an orchestration of a symphony. Right now, the AI is getting used across the board in a different fashion, but there's a spectrum of it. There's a world where AI is getting assisted, which means that as a developer, I'm actually guiding AI on what to do. That is one level of depth. It starts with doing like actual writing of the code. They have Cloud Code, they have Cursor, they have GitHub Copilot, they have Codex.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the role of the senior director of engineering productivity at Dropbox?
0:00–5:11
2
How does Dropbox define the shift from AI‑assisted to agentic engineering?
5:11–9:37
3
What is Nova and how does it automate repetitive developer tasks?
9:37–14:18
4
How does Nova handle migrations and package upgrades at scale?
14:18–19:25
5
What metrics does Dropbox use to measure AI‑driven productivity gains?
19:25–24:24
6
How are engineers adapting to AI tools while maintaining code quality and trust?
24:24–29:54
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Working Smarter
Protecting your team’s content, wherever it’s stored—so you can safely use AI
Building AI that can search inside videos (and photos and audio too)
How agentic AI works behind the scenes to find the answers you need
Why don’t more AI tools understand what matters to you?
Coming soon: Working Smarter season three