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Paul Ruan

@paulruan

Staff software engineer building large-scale SaaS, enterprise search, and AI productivity platforms that users trust and adopt.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to build hands-on AI platform and enterprise search systems—strong distributed architecture, grounded AI quality, and measurable impact—while collaborating cross-functionally to ship reliable, permission-aware workflows customers adopt.

I’m a Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience building large-scale SaaS, search, and AI-powered productivity platforms at Dropbox. I specialize in distributed systems, enterprise search, AI-assisted workflows, and platform engineering—staying deeply hands-on across architecture and implementation.

At Dropbox Dash, I’ve led architecture initiatives across multiple teams to evolve retrieval into a multi-stage AI orchestration platform, improving enterprise search relevance and driving adoption growth. I’ve also built permission-aware retrieval and AI summarization, agentic workflow orchestration, multimodal indexing pipelines, and evaluation frameworks for retrieval quality and grounded AI responses—while mentoring technical leaders to align roadmaps across engineering, product, security, and enterprise customers.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Staff Software Engineer

Current

Dropbox

Feb 2023 - Present (3 years 5 months)

Led architecture initiatives for Dropbox Dash, evolving it into a multi-stage AI orchestration platform and improving enterprise search relevance by 37% while reducing failed enterprise queries by 42%. Built permission-aware retrieval, AI summarization, and agentic workflow orchestration services to increase Dash engagement by 31%.

Go Python Kubernetes gRPC Kafka OpenSearch PyTorch Redis OAUTH2 RBAC LangGraph Asynchronous Task Pipelines Ray S3 GPU Inference MLFlow Datadog Snowflake

Senior Software Engineer

Dropbox

Sep 2020 - Feb 2023 (2 years 5 months)

Architected ML-powered search relevance and recommendation systems for Dropbox Intelligent Content Discovery, improving successful document discovery rates by 28%. Developed large-scale OCR and metadata pipelines and redesigned query serving infrastructure to reduce p95 enterprise search latency by 41%.

TensorFlow Python Go Redis Elasticsearch Apache Spark Kafka Airflow Snowflake gRPC Kubernetes MLFlow Docker CI CD A B Testing Recommendation Systems Ranking Systems

Software Engineer

Dropbox

Jun 2014 - Sep 2020 (6 years 3 months)

Built Smart Workspace Infrastructure services for distributed file indexing, metadata synchronization, and collaboration across Dropbox Business. Improved enterprise file search freshness by 34%, supported scalable collaboration APIs for millions of daily workflows, and implemented monitoring and reliability tooling using Grafana, Prometheus, and Airflow.