# Dropbox's Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

DevFeed: [Dropbox's Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/dropbox-s-former-most-senior-eng-building-great-systems-and-advice-for-the-ai-era-james-cowling-18091.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.developing.dev/p/dropboxs-former-most-senior-eng-building>)

Author: Ryan Peterman

Published: 2026-05-25T10:00:57Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [The Developing Dev](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-developing-dev.md>)

Topics: [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [Concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/concurrency.md>), [Transactions](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/transactions.md>), [Computer science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/computer-science.md>), [Replication](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/replication.md>), [Protocol (disambiguation)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/protocol.md>)

Tags: [concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/concurrency.md>), [consensus](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/consensus.md>), [distributed](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed.md>), [distributed-system](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-system.md>), [distributed-transaction](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-transaction.md>), [protocol](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/protocol.md>), [replication](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/replication.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [technical](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical.md>), [transactions](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/transactions.md>)

## AI overview

A podcast interview with James Cowling, CTO of Convex and former senior engineer at Dropbox, about designing abstractions and large-scale transactional systems. Cowling discusses Granola, distributed transaction coordination, concurrency, Byzantine fault tolerance, and career advice in the context of AI.

## Source excerpt

Transcript & Audio