Dropbox, the San Francisco company that enables people and businesses to share documents and other content across their own devices and with others, is to start hiring "aggressively" at its European base in Dublin.

The company, which has 175 million users, a third of them in Europe, currently employs 15 people in Ireland. The new jobs will be in the areas of sales and accounts, and in user support.

Hiring spree
"We're not really giving [expected job] numbers at this point, but 15 is really only the very first step. The goal at this time is really to hire as aggressively as possible," Johann Butting, head of operations and online sales for Dropbox in Europe, said yesterday.

Dropbox opened its Dublin base last December in temporary quarters in the city, and is also now looking for a larger premises to accommodate its expected growth, Butting said. The company feels it can no longer manage its large European user base out of the US, and has decided to put dedicated European support in place, he said.

As part of the hiring drive, the company launches a new, one-year long Dropbox associate programme today aimed at recent college graduates “with zero to two years’ work experience”.

New hires on the paid programme will spend the majority of that time in San Francisco at Dropbox headquarters “where you’ll learn more about our product, users, and culture”, according to the programme description.

The new employees will then be based in Dublin where they will take three further modules of training in either sales or user support.

While Dropbox expects to hire globally for the jobs, “the focus is Ireland and Europe and the recruiting efforts we’re taking reflect this. We’ll be speaking to all the universities here, and target specific universities we have identified in Europe,” said Butting.

Prospective hires for the programme will need a good university degree and be able to work with numbers and data, he said.

Three traits
The company looks for three traits in employees.

“We’re looking for excellent communicators, for analytically very strong people, and we’re looking for everyone to contribute something special, as we build the diversity of the company. It’s really important to have fun.”

One of the job requirements listed in the formal position listing at the company website is “you’re good fun”.

It isn’t important what area a candidate’s core degree is in, Butting added, noting Dropbox is also looking for people who have been out of college for a year or two.

A former senior director at Google Ireland for three years, Butting said the past half year in Dublin has been spent setting up Dropbox's infrastructure for global processing, and establishing a core team of workers.

The company came to Dublin specifically because it felt the location enabled it “to have access to talent to support and build a scaleable product”, he said.

“What’s great about Dublin is there are so many companies here now that have started building that talent base. We feel we have the chance to find senior managers with those talents as well as junior members of the team.”

Dropbox has been expanding rapidly over the past year. At its recent, first developer’s conference in San Francisco, it announced it would dramatically expand its offering from the existing service to a full-blown platform.

The company was founded in 2007 by two MIT students. Steve Jobs unsuccessfully tried to buy the company in 2009.