Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure

About the Role

The Product Infrastructure team works on creating abstractions and data models that solve enduring problems across the stack. We solve problems that span multiple product surfaces and typically stretch across both front-end and backend and unblock new product avenues that were previously challenging to create.

This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days.

What You'll Achieve

• Shape and build the core frameworks that enable reading and writing data in Notion, integrating feedback from internal customers along the way, using whatever tools are required for the job, such as AWS, Postgres, NodeJS, TypeScript, React on the frontend.
• Design new systems and abstractions that improve developer productivity, reliability, and performance by handling entire classes of problems up-front for product engineers.
• Solve hard technical challenges such as designing abstractions for efficient traversal of the user content graph, building a system to sync user content for offline use, or scaling our permission model to serve large customers with complex content.

Skills You'll Need to Bring

• Thoughtful problem-solving: For you, problem-solving starts with a clear and accurate understanding of the context. You can decompose tricky problems and work towards a clean solution.
• Pragmatic and business-oriented: You care about business impact and prioritize projects accordingly. You're not just going after cool stuff-you understand the balance between craft, speed, and the bottom line.
• Strive for simplicity: You think critically about the implications of what you're building, and aim for the most simple and well-crafted design. You understand the consequence of complexity, and are motivated to eliminate them.
• Not ideological about technology: To you, technologies and programming languages are about tradeoffs. You may be opinionated, but you're not ideological and can learn new technologies as you go.
• Empathetic communication: You communicate nuanced ideas clearly, whether you're explaining technical decisions in writing or brainstorming in real time. In disagreements, you engage thoughtfully with other perspectives and compromise when needed.
• Team player: For you, work isn't a solo endeavor. You enjoy collaborating cross-functionally to accomplish shared goals, and you care about learning, growing, and helping others to do the same.

Nice to Haves

• You have leveraged the features of typed languages (e.g. TypeScript, Flow) to drive code migrations, or have implemented your own data modeling paradigms (e.g. writing your own ORM, sync engine, or query language).
• You have seen how fundamental abstractions scale within a large codebase, and are curious about how different organizations solve similar problems (e.g. TAO by Meta, Zanzibar by Google).
• You've heard of computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others-and understand why we're big fans of their work.
• You have interests outside of technology, such as in art, history, or social sciences.

Pay and benefits

Notion is committed to providing highly competitive cash compensation, equity, and benefits. The compensation offered for this role will be based on multiple factors such as location, the role’s scope and complexity, and the candidate’s experience and expertise, and may vary from the range provided below. For roles based in San Francisco or New York City, the estimated base salary range for this role is $150,000 - $200,000 per year.

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A Note on AI

You don’t need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect every Notino to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement - when that’s the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don’t treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.