Dropbox Interview Questions (4+ Questions)
Last Updated: June 23, 2026 β’ 4 Questions β’ Real Company Interviews
Prepare for your Dropbox interview with our comprehensive collection of 4+ real interview questions and detailed answers. These questions have been curated from actual Dropbox technical interviews across various roles including DevOps Engineer, Data Engineer, QA Engineer, and more.
Table of Contents
- Identify High Disk I/O Process (medium) π
- Secure Internal Service Communication (medium)
- Terraform Resource Configuration (easy) π
- Find Nth Highest Revenue (easy)
Our Dropbox interview questions cover a wide range of technical topics and difficulty levels, from entry-level positions to senior roles. Each question includes detailed explanations and answers to help you understand the concepts and prepare effectively for your interview.
π‘ Pro Tips for Dropbox Interviews
- Practice each question and understand the underlying concepts
- Review Dropbox's specific technologies and methodologies
- Prepare follow-up questions and edge cases
- Practice explaining your solutions clearly and concisely
Interview Questions & Answers
1. Identify High Disk I/O Process
Diagnose and resolve disk I/O saturation issues by identifying resource-hungry processes. Learn how to use iostat, vmstat, iotop, and lsof to detect excessive disk I/O, locate the offending process and its target files, and take corrective action through process termination or I/O throttling with ionice. This guide covers understanding I/O wait metrics, analyzing per-process disk usage, inspecting open files, and verifying disk utilization returns to normal levels. Essential for troubleshooting slow server performance, preventing backup jobs from saturating storage, and maintaining responsive applications during high I/O workloads.
2. Secure Internal Service Communication
We have an application that requires TLS certificates for internal services for communication. We'll need to set up cert manager to issue a valid TLS certificate using a self-signed cluster issuer to bootstrap a ca issuer. We have service A and we have service B. Service A sends traffic to service B, and service B is a web server. Our service B has to present a valid certificate. We need to add ECA true. Otherwise, our intermediate certificate will not be able to issue leaf certificates. Leaf meaning the final certificates. Next we'll create our CA issuer, which will be used to issue our leaf certificates. This issuer will use the certificate that we just created with ca True. The important part is DNS names, because certificate has to include those DNS names in subject alternative name. Otherwise it'll not be valid certificate.
3. Terraform Resource Configuration
How to Set Up a Resource Dependency Chain in Terraform: Random String Generator and Null Resources
Setting up a resource dependency chain in Terraform is essential for effective resource management and configuration. In this example, we will create three interconnected resources: a random strin...
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4. Find Nth Highest Revenue
We will write a query to find N's highest revenue. We have sales table with columns like ID, product, and revenue. Our job is simply to find the third highest distinct revenue value. We need to keep in mind that product with same revenue count as one value, not two. Our query will consist of three steps. First, we get rid of duplicates, then what's left, we rank from highest to lowest, and then pick the one on third place. A window function performs a calculation across multiple rows, but unlike group by, it does not collapse everything into one result. The word just activates the window function. We sort the revenue column out in descending order so that on the first place, we get the highest value. We filter the column where rank equals to three, and we find the value on the third position.
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