Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure

About the role

The Product Infrastructure team at Notion works on creating abstractions and data models that solve enduring problems across the stack. 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• Skills You’ll Need to Bring:
  • Thoughtful problem-solving
  • Pragmatic and business-oriented
  • Strive for simplicity
  • Not ideological about technology
  • Empathetic communication
  • Team player
• Nice to Haves:
  • Leveraged the features of typed languages (e.g. TypeScript, Flow) to drive code migrations, or implemented your own data modeling paradigms (e.g. writing your own ORM, sync engine, or query language).
  • 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).
  • Understood the work of computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others—and understood why we're big fans of their work.
  • Have interests outside of technology, such as in art, history, or social sciences.

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.

Pay

The estimated base salary range for this role is $209,000 - $240,000 per year.

Schedule

We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person.