According to Josh Clemm, “enterprise search is broken” — and Dropbox Dash is here to fix it.
As vice president of engineering at Dropbox, he oversaw the development of Dropbox Dash, a tool that enables teams to find and create content quickly across various applications.
“With Dash, we’re building universal search — and that’s just the start,” Clemm told Built In. “Once we solve for finding, we unlock the next wave: automations, agent actions and intelligent workflows that improve how work happens across the board.”
Prior to joining Dropbox, he helped simplify complex systems at other major organizations. As an early engineer at LinkedIn, Clemm helped the company find ways to surface relevant insights in the moment to help professionals connect, find jobs and grow. At Uber Eats, he played a part in making the company’s food ordering process more seamless and personalized, helping the platform grow to over $70 billion in gross bookings.
Now, Clemm wants to help Dropbox achieve the same growth through the creation of impactful tools like Dropbox Dash.
“We’re designing tools that meet people where they are — and help them spend more time doing meaningful work,” he said.
For Clemm, the work the company’s engineers accomplish points to one singular truth: “Dropbox is more than file storage — we’re building as an AI company.”
As the company continues to develop new AI capabilities for Dropbox Dash, Clemm is staying busy guiding the company’s engineering teams, cultivating what he considers essential for great engineering: “clear goals, strong ownership and space to lead.”
Below, Clemm shares more about the work he does overseeing the evolution of Dropbox Dash, the challenges and wins his teams have encountered along the way and the new solution’s overall impact.
What ongoing innovative efforts would Dropbox like the world to know about, and what makes this work so impactful?
We want people to know: Dropbox is more than file storage — we’re building as an AI company. We’re creating Dropbox Dash, our new productivity tool, and innovating in ways that uniquely position us to shape the future of work. Enterprise search is broken. Teams spend too much time hunting across disconnected SaaS apps. With Dash, we’re building universal search — and that’s just the start. Once we solve for finding, we unlock the next wave: automations, agent actions and intelligent workflows that improve how work happens across the board. All of it, grounded in a secure-first foundation.
What’s your title and what are your responsibilities? Are there roles or unofficial titles you hold as part of your leadership identity?
I’m the vice president of engineering, responsible for the execution and delivery of Dropbox Dash — from roadmap to reality. But more than that, I think of my role as creating the conditions for great engineering: clear goals, strong ownership and space to lead. I oversee all engineering functions behind Dash, which includes front-end teams building our website, browser extension, desktop app and mobile apps as well as back-end engineers building our platform, connecting third-party apps, standardizing data, building search indices — lexical and vector — and powering our knowledge graph. I also oversee machine learning engineers designing content understanding, boosting search relevance, recommending next-best actions and shaping our conversational AI. Because my team leads development of new AI capabilities for Dash, I also help ensure all engineers at Dropbox can integrate large language model assistance into their workflows and that we continue expanding AI across the core Dropbox experience.
“I think of my role as creating the conditions for great engineering: clear goals, strong ownership and space to lead.”
What challenges or wins are most important to highlighting how you support your team and the company?
We launched Dropbox Dash in October 2024. We focused on rhythm and clarity, implementing bi-weekly all-hands meetings to share context and celebrate progress and persistent Zoom/Slack rooms to keep teams connected across time zones. When building major features, we use a squad-based model — spinning up focused teams with a directly responsible individual empowered to make decisions. It’s how we move quickly, but also how we grow leaders. For example, to deliver multimedia search, we created a squad focused on image and video, which encompasses data integration, embedding extraction, optical character recognition, storage and search relevance — end to end. For our messaging integrations, specifically Slack and Microsoft Teams, another squad tackled the unique modeling and retrieval challenges of chat data.
What makes Dropbox Dash so exciting, and how does it highlight the vision and mission of your work?
Dropbox Dash is a major opportunity to significantly boost worker productivity by unifying today’s fragmented digital workspace. Most work happens across a patchwork of tools — HR systems, sales platforms, bug trackers, Slack and more. Dash brings that ecosystem together in one intelligent interface. Technically, that means ingesting and modeling data from many sources, building insights on top of it and creating a robust knowledge graph to connect people, meetings, projects and content — surfacing relevant context for users. Our search system also spans formats like images, screenshots, URLs, video clips, Zoom transcripts and more, not just documents. And Dash goes beyond search; we’re building collaborative features like Stacks, which let users define, share and collaborate on their working sets, in addition to automation and intelligent agents to help people take action. Our chat interface is designed to be intuitive — no prompt engineering required — so users can drive outcomes with a simple click.
