Sahil Agarwal

Engineering Leader @ Dropbox | Defining Agentic Identity & Auth for the AI Era | Scaling Secure Platforms to 700M+ Users

San Francisco Bay Area

About

Engineering leader with 11+ years of experience driving impact at scale, leading high-performing teams, scaling platforms, and launching transformational initiatives across product, infrastructure, and AI domains. Currently at Dropbox, I lead engineering initiatives focused on accelerating developer productivity, building unified identity systems for AI agents, and shaping a future-ready platform designed to support the emerging era of AI swarms. I’ve built and scaled distributed systems, led zero-downtime migrations affecting billions of users, and shipped foundational architecture changes that enable modern product innovation.What sets me apart is my blend of technical depth and business acumen. I don’t just ship code, I shape vision, define product strategy, and drive cross-org alignment to solve complex, high-leverage problems. I’ve led through ambiguity, rallied teams through layoffs, and built resilient orgs that deliver under pressure. Outside of Dropbox, I serve as an advisor to early-stage startups, helping founders navigate technical architecture, team design, and product-market fit, most recently at Brainvoy.ai, an AI-native company rethinking how ecommerce companies monitor and act on business-critical signals.If you’re building ambitious products, tackling systems at scale, or need to turn vision into execution, I’d love to connect.

Experience

  • Dropbox (Full-time · 4 yrs 4 mos)
    • Senior Engineering Manager- Identity & Access
      Jan 2026 - Present · 6 mos

    • AI Strategy & Tooling Lead
      Oct 2024 - Feb 2026 · 1 yr 5 mos

      Tooling & Tech Scouting: Identifying AI platforms, models, and frameworks that meaningfully enhance Dropbox products and developer workflows. Identity & Authorization Innovation: Proactively defining how Dropbox should support agentic, non-human identity authorization and authentication in an AI-powered future. AI Systems Design: Conceptualizing the architecture for AI-assisted migration systems, intelligent workflows, and next-generation developer tooling. Cross-functional Alignment: Partnering with engineering, product, and research teams to translate strategic AI opportunities into actionable roadmaps and prototypes.

    • Engineering Manager - Identity and Access Platform
      Feb 2025 - Jan 2026 · 1 yr

      Driving the evolution of Dropbox’s core platforms to be AI-ready and future-proof across products like Dash, Sign, Send, Reclaim, and File Sync & Share. Leading engineering for Dropbox’s next-generation identity platform, unifying human, device, and AI agent identity across the entire product suite

  • Fellow at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
    Jun 2026 - Present · 1 mo

  • Advisor at Brainvoy
    Jul 2024 - Present · 2 yrs

    Provide strategic guidance on AI and machine learning infrastructure, helping scale prototypes into production-grade systems. Advise on product roadmap alignment, technology stack evaluation, data pipeline architecture, and technical hiring strategy to attract top-tier engineering talent

  • ServiceNow (Full-time · 6 yrs 11 mos)
    • Senior Engineering Manager
      Mar 2019 - Mar 2022 · 3 yrs 1 mo

      Commercialized internal performance monitoring tooling into Performance as a Product, generating millions per customer annually in high-margin recurring revenue (ARR/churn defense)

    • Engineering Manager
      Aug 2016 - Mar 2019 · 2 yrs 8 mos

      • Led the Cloud Tiger Team to address executive initiatives targeting customer issues and market opportunities. • Developed hyper-realistic traffic simulations to enhance product offerings within a governed environment. • Implemented low-code/no-code software development practices to significantly boost engineering productivity. • Collaborated cross-functionally to align engineering efforts with strategic business goals at ServiceNow.

    • Software Engineer
      May 2015 - Aug 2016 · 1 yr 4 mos

  • Software Engineer at Qualcomm
    May 2014 - May 2015 · 1 yr 1 mo

    MSM8994 Platform Software Enablement (Snapdragon 810) • Contributed to flagship 64-bit mobile SoC platform software stack deployed in 60+ premium smartphones reaching tens of millions of users globally (Sony Xperia Z5, Google Nexus 6P, HTC One M9, LG G Flex 2, OnePlus 2, Microsoft Lumia 950 XL) • Developed thermal and power management firmware implementing trip-point detection, GPU/memory power gating, and adaptive thermal policies mitigating Snapdragon 810's thermal challenges • Optimized CPU frequency scaling, big.LITTLE task scheduling, and dynamic hotplug mechanisms in Android/Linux kernel, balancing performance across heterogeneous core clusters • Improved sustained GPU throughput by 15% under 4K video playback and gaming through memory bandwidth optimization and frame-buffer access pattern tuning • Reduced boot time by 30% relative to prior Snapdragon platforms through bootloader handoff optimization and initialization ordering improvements