Working Smarter

AI isn't just transforming the way we work, but also the way we write the software that people use for work. In this episode, we talk to two engineering productivity leads at Dropbox: Uma Namasivayam, senior director of software engineering productivity, and Anuradha Agarwal, director of software engineering. Whether it’s writing tests, fixing bugs, tackling tech debt, or accelerating migrations, they explain how Dropbox engineers are using agentic AI—including in-house tools like Nova—to build the future of Dropbox, and create more space to do impactful work.

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 Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith.

Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck. 

Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. 

Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!

AI makes it easier than ever to find and act on information—especially now that teams can connect to and search across all the apps they use for work. So how do you ensure that only the right people and the right tools can access your team’s most sensitive content?

In this episode, we talk with Jess Jimenez, the head of security at Dropbox, about what security looks like in the age of AI at Dropbox-scale—from building AI products securely to building trust with the people who use them. Jess talks about the importance of access control lists, defending against the latest AI threats, and how Dropbox Protect helps teams securely share content with both humans and AI so they can collaborate more safely.

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 Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith.

Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck. 

Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. 

Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!

Not all work happens in writing. Teams that work with photos, videos, and audio need AI that works for them too. This is why, with Dropbox, you can search within multimedia content for key moments and important information—not just text.

In this episode, we talk with Appu Shaji and Hicham Badri, two Dropbox machine learning engineers who are part of the team that makes all of this possible. They explain how multimodal search works—from understanding the context of the initial query, to identifying objects and actions in complex scenes—and how they ensure those models work fast, even at Dropbox-scale.

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 Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith.

Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck. 

Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. 

Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!

When AI is at its best, the conversations can feel uncanny—almost magical in their accuracy, relevance, and speed. For that you can thank the AI agents that work together behind the scenes to search, reason, and sift through all your content to get you what you need to do your job.

We talk with Jongmin Baek and Marta Mendez, two Dropbox machine learning engineers, about building conversational AI that's helpful, useful, and grounded in your team’s shared context, so you can spend more time on the work that really matters.

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 Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith.

Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck. 

Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. 

Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!

How do you build AI that actually understands you and the work you do? It all starts with having the right context. 

We talk with Dropbox staff product manager Noorain Noorani and principal engineer Sean-Michael Lewis about the art of context engineering and how Dropbox connects to all the tools your team needs for work—so you get AI that works wherever you do. 

~ ~ ~

 Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox.

You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai

This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith.

Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck.

Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. 

Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!