Vladimir Sheyda
San Francisco Bay Area
Executive Summary
Engineering executive with 15+ years of experience leading cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, and security teams in high-scale SaaS and enterprise environments. Currently Director at Dropbox, overseeing Cloud Platform across compute, traffic, and developer experience for a global-scale user base. Proven track record of driving hybrid cloud strategy, reducing infra costs at scale, and improving developer velocity through platform abstraction. Skilled at scaling high-performing teams (100+), aligning infra strategy to business outcomes, and navigating complex org dynamics. Now seeking VP or Head of Platform role to lead innovation in AI-native infrastructure, developer platforms, or next-gen SaaS at scale.
Areas of Expertise
Cloud Infrastructure Strategy
Kubernetes, AWS, Hybrid Cloud
Internal Developer Platforms & DevEx
Platform engineering, developer experience
Platform & Traffic Engineering
Global scale, edge networks, CDN
Infrastructure Efficiency & Reliability
SRE, monitoring, cost optimization, SLA/SLOs
Org Scaling & Leadership
100+ FTEs, global teams, results focused culture
Distributed Systems
1000s of microservices, global scale
Application & Network Security
WAF, IPS, DDOS, threat detection and mitigation
Executive Stakeholder Management
Strategy, business alignment, communication
Experience
Dropbox — San Francisco / Remote
2017 – PresentSr. Director of Engineering, Head of Cloud Platform
Own and lead Dropbox's Cloud Platform org, comprising Compute Orchestration, Traffic Engineering, and Developer Platforms. Scope includes infrastructure strategy, developer velocity, site reliability, and global network performance supporting 700+ engineers and 700M+ users.
- Developer Platform: Led the design and rollout of Atlas, Dropbox's managed internal app platform, enabling consistent, secure, and high-velocity delivery. Improved deployment velocity by 30%, enabling a daily release cadence.
- Compute & Orchestration: Delivered a multi-tenant orchestration layer that doubled fleet efficiency across 50K+ hosts; integrated continuous delivery pipelines with staged rollouts and canary analysis.
- Traffic Engineering: Evolved Dropbox's global edge network for optimal user experience. RUM-based traffic management improved global p75 latency by 10% and uptime SLA from 99.5% to 99.9%.
- Strategic Initiatives: Spearheaded Dropbox's hybrid cloud initiative, shifting from bespoke infra to OSS & third-party tools to drive sustainability and focus engineering effort on differentiators.
- Security & Resilience: Implemented DDOS detection and mitigation systems reducing time-to-mitigate by 10x and increasing threat volume capacity by 10x.
F5 Networks — San Jose, CA
2016 – 2017Director of Product Development
Led development and QA org for F5's application security portfolio, including IPS, traffic analytics, and advanced firewall features. Drove the roadmap, built team capabilities, and increased release velocity 4x via DevOps adoption and CI/CD transformation.
- Delivered machine learning-powered IPS feature set reducing false positives.
- Managed budgeting, hiring, cross-functional planning, and direct customer engagements for roadmap shaping.
F5 Networks — San Jose, CA
2012 – 2016Senior Manager → Manager, QA & Dev
Grew and led multiple distributed teams across product development, QA, and protocol analysis for advanced firewall and DoS defense systems.
- Built Traffic Intelligence product from scratch in under 12 months; now adopted by global telcos.
- Grew a team of protocol signature developers and built internal tooling for rapid protocol analysis and classification - 3000+ protocol signatures developed in 6 months.
F5 Networks — Tomsk, Russia → San Jose, CA
2005 – 2012Technical Lead, QA & Security Engineering
Held successive engineering leadership roles focused on anomaly detection, WAFs, and web application security. Helped build global performance testing discipline and led system test teams across regions.
Education
Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics — Russia
Specialist in Information Security (BS/MS Equivalent) — Graduated with Highest Honors
Languages
Russian (native), English (fluent)