Software Engineer, Early Career (AI)

About the role

This role is an Early Career AI Engineer position at Notion. You will partner with your team to prototype and ship AI-powered product improvements. You will own scoped productionization projects, integrating new models/techniques into workflows, adding monitoring and guardrails, or improving latency, cost, and reliability. You will contribute to evaluation and iteration loops by building or extending evaluation sets, running experiments, analyzing results, and translating learnings into product or system changes.

Responsibilities

• Partner with your team to prototype and ship AI-powered product improvements
• Own a scoped productionization project: integrate a new model/technique into an existing workflow, add monitoring + guardrails, or improve latency/cost/reliability
• Contribute to evaluation and iteration loops: build or extend an evaluation set, run experiments, analyze results, and translate learnings into product or system changes

Requirements

• You have less than two years of engineering experience
• You have solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems, with a customer-minded, pragmatic approach to solving problems
• You are excited to build and iterate quickly, and you’ve started exploring AI/ML through coursework, projects, internships, or hackathons
• You are comfortable learning how different parts of a product fit together (UI, APIs, data), have some familiarity with relational databases like Postgres or MySQL, and can take an idea from prototype to a working feature with guidance
• You approach problems holistically, starting with a clear and accurate understanding of the context. You think about the implications of what you're building and how it will impact real people's lives. You can navigate ambiguity successfully, decompose complex problems into clean solutions, while also balancing the business impact of what you’re building
• You see technologies as tools to achieve user impact rather than ends in themselves. You care more about building successful systems that solve real problems than about using specific tech stacks or following trends. You stay current with the latest tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and other AI-assisted development environments, you're pragmatic about choosing the right tool for the job, focusing on what delivers the most value to users and the business
• You own your work, communicating clearly about progress and blockers. You don't wait for instructions for every step but rather show initiative in identifying what needs to be done and driving projects forward. You ask questions when needed while independently finding solutions to problems

Skills

• To bring, you have less than two years of engineering experience
• You have solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems, with a customer-minded, pragmatic approach to solving problems
• You are excited to build and iterate quickly, and you’ve started exploring AI/ML through coursework, projects, internships, or hackathons
• You are comfortable learning how different parts of a product fit together (UI, APIs, data), have some familiarity with relational databases like Postgres or MySQL, and can take an idea from prototype to a working feature with guidance
• You approach problems holistically, starting with a clear and accurate understanding of the context. You think about the implications of what you're building and how it will impact real people's lives. You can navigate ambiguity successfully, decompose complex problems into clean solutions, while also balancing the business impact of what you’re building
• You see technologies as tools to achieve user impact rather than ends in themselves. You care more about building successful systems that solve real problems than about using specific tech stacks or following trends. You stay current with the latest tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and other AI-assisted development environments, you're pragmatic about choosing the right tool for the job, focusing on what delivers the most value to users and the business
• You own your work, communicating clearly about progress and blockers. You don't wait for instructions for every step but rather show initiative in identifying what needs to be done and driving projects forward. You ask questions when needed while independently finding solutions to problems

Nice to Haves

• You have experience with any part of our technology stack: React, TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, and Elasticsearch
• You care about the interaction between technology and society, the ways in which they inform each other, and our responsibility as technologists to be conscious of that relationship
• 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