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Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. Expertise spans distributed systems, enterprise search, RAG/LLM-powered applications, and platform engineering using Go, Python, Java, React, Kubernetes, and AWS. Hands-on engineering leader who architects and delivers end-to-end solutions across multiple teams—improving retrieval relevance, reliability, security, and cost—while driving measurable outcomes through experimentation, observability, and evaluation frameworks.…Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. Expertise spans distributed systems, enterprise search, RAG/LLM-powered applications, and platform engineering using Go, Python, Java, React, Kubernetes, and AWS. Hands-on engineering leader who architects and delivers end-to-end solutions across multiple teams—improving retrieval relevance, reliability, security, and cost—while driving measurable outcomes through experimentation, observability, and evaluation frameworks.

Paul Ruan

3D Animator, AI Engineer, Back-End Developer, +3

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Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. Expertise spans distributed systems, enterprise search, RAG/LLM-powered applications, and platform engineering using Go, Python, Java, React, Kubernetes, and AWS. Hands-on engineering leader who architects and delivers end-to-end solutions across multiple teams—improving retrieval relevance, reliability, security, and cost—while driving measurable outcomes through experimentation, observability, and evaluation frameworks.…Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. Expertise spans distributed systems, enterprise search, RAG/LLM-powered applications, and platform engineering using Go, Python, Java, React, Kubernetes, and AWS. Hands-on engineering leader who architects and delivers end-to-end solutions across multiple teams—improving retrieval relevance, reliability, security, and cost—while driving measurable outcomes through experimentation, observability, and evaluation frameworks.

Available to hire

Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. Expertise spans distributed systems, enterprise search, RAG/LLM-powered applications, and platform engineering using Go, Python, Java, React, Kubernetes, and AWS.

Hands-on engineering leader who architects and delivers end-to-end solutions across multiple teams—improving retrieval relevance, reliability, security, and cost—while driving measurable outcomes through experimentation, observability, and evaluation frameworks.

Skills

Experience Level

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Intermediate

Intermediate

Intermediate

Intermediate

Beginner

Language

Aragonese

Advanced

Javanese

Advanced

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer at Dropbox

February 1, 2023 - Present

Led architecture and development for Dropbox Dash, an AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge workspace connecting Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Notion, Zoom, and Microsoft 365 into a unified AI productivity platform. Drove multi-stage AI orchestration for search using Go, Python, Kubernetes, gRPC, Kafka, and OpenSearch, improving enterprise search relevance by 37% and contributing to double-digit enterprise adoption growth. Designed hybrid retrieval combining vector search, BM25, embedding pipelines, and ranking models using PyTorch, OpenAI APIs, and Redis, reducing failed enterprise queries by 42% at billion-scale. Built permission-aware retrieval and AI summarization with OAuth2/RBAC and policy enforcement via middleware and graph APIs. Developed agentic workflow orchestration services with LangChain/LangGraph and async task pipelines to automate meeting summaries, onboarding brief generation, and cross-app contextual recommendations, increasing weekly Dash engagement by 31

Senior Software Engineer at Dropbox

September 1, 2020 - February 1, 2023

Architected ML-powered search ranking and recommendation services for the intelligent content discovery platform, improving personalized document discovery success by 28% across millions of enterprise searches. Built large-scale OCR and metadata extraction pipelines using Apache Spark, Kafka, TensorFlow, and distributed workers to support indexing for billions of scanned PDFs and image-based documents. Developed recommendation systems using behavioral analytics, collaborative filtering, and semantic similarity models with Airflow, Snowflake, and feature store pipelines, increasing workplace collaboration engagement by 19%. Improved search latency and ranking consistency by redesigning query serving infrastructure with gRPC, Kubernetes, and adaptive caching layers, reducing p95 enterprise search latency by 41%. Collaborated with data science/experimentation teams to productionize ML ranking models and A/B testing frameworks using MLflow, Docker, and CI/CD, accelerating deployment cycles

Software Engineer at Dropbox

June 1, 2014 - September 1, 2020

Worked on Smart Workspace infrastructure including distributed storage, collaboration, and intelligent file indexing powering Dropbox Sync, search, and team collaboration. Built backend services for intelligent file indexing and metadata synchronization using Java, Go, MySQL, Memcached, and distributed event pipelines, improving enterprise file search freshness and reducing sync inconsistencies by 34%. Developed scalable collaboration APIs and activity feed services using Python, REST APIs, Kafka, and Redis to support millions of daily team sharing and commenting workflows for Dropbox Business customers. Enhanced image processing and content understanding pipelines with OpenCV and OCR/metadata extraction systems to expand searchable media coverage and improve visual content discovery. Optimized storage and caching with MySQL sharding, Redis, Ceph, and asynchronous replication services, reducing infrastructure costs while supporting continued enterprise customer growth. Implemented moni