Software Engineer, User Database Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco, California Workplace: Hybrid WHO WE ARE Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpYpWfEK5s. We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. ABOUT THE ROLE: This role will be based in San Francisco. 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. You’ll build the systems that let any knowledge worker leverage fast, scalable databases without having to become a DBA. You’ll be a hands-on technical leader, helping set the architectural direction and roadmap as we take a new product from early alpha to general availability. You’ll work directly with early customers to shape foundational technical and product decisions. Then, together, we’ll work on scaling as adoption and workloads grow. This is a backend-leaning role with work spanning the stack. You might build the systems that provision and manage a fleet of customer Postgres instances, design how user-defined schemas evolve safely, or make complex queries execute efficiently. You’ll also follow those systems into the product: improving how a table loads, how users understand a slow operation, or how an agent safely works with their data. You’ll help shape the architecture and the product together. Some problems call for a better abstraction, others for a better default, and others for rethinking what we ask the user to do in the first place. You’ll work with teammates and customers to find those answers, ship practical solutions, and evolve them as usage grows. Our stack includes Postgres, Go, TypeScript, Node.js, and React. ABOUT THE TEAM: The people who understand a business best aren’t always the people who can build its software. A support lead knows how tickets should be triaged. An operations manager knows how inventory should move. But turning that knowledge into a reliable system often means finding an engineer, provisioning a database, and building an application. We’re building database infrastructure for everyone else. We want everyday knowledge workers to bring their data into Notion, connect it, and build workflows around it. And do so with the power of a real database (Postgres!) and the approachability of a tool they already know. AI agents make that opportunity even bigger: helping people build and operate systems they couldn’t have created on their own. For our team, this is much more than putting a friendly interface on Postgres. It means making hard database problems disappear from the user’s workflow without sacrificing correctness, performance, or flexibility. How do you let someone reshape a live database as easily as editing a document? Make the right indexes exist without asking someone to become a DBA? Let a weekend experiment grow into a company’s system of record without anyone having to rearchitect it? WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE: - Take a new product from alpha to general availability. Work with early customers to understand what matters, iterate on feedback, and help shape what we ship. - Make real customer workloads fast. Improve query execution, indexing, and client data loading so performance holds up as datasets grow and workflows become more demanding. - Build systems businesses can trust with their data. Make schema changes, concurrent writes, permissions, and recovery reliable enough for customers to build essential workflows on top. - Make powerful capabilities approachable. Turn database provisioning, migrations, and indexes into a reliable, easy-to-use product experience that gives people the power of a database without the burden of managing one. - Build for the customers who come next. Automate database provisioning and fleet operations, strengthen observability, and evolve the architecture so we can serve many, many customers. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING: - Production relational database experience (e.g., Postgres or MySQL). You’ve made decisions about schemas and indexes, analyzed database performance, and debugged issues involving transactions, locking, or concurrency. Your experience goes beyond accessing a database through an ORM. - Engineering experience and technical leadership. You bring 10+ years of experience building and operating production software, with a track record of setting technical direction and leading complex, cross-team initiatives from concept through delivery. You identify the most important problems to solve, turn ambiguous goals into a technical strategy, and align engineers and partner teams around a practical plan. You stay hands-on while helping others make better decisions through design reviews, mentorship, and clear technical guidance. - Strong backend engineering fundamentals. You’ve built services that need to remain correct under concurrency and failure. You can reason about retries, partial failures, consistency, and the trade-offs involved in reliable reads and writes. - A systematic approach to performance. You use query plans, traces, profiles, and experiments to find bottlenecks and verify improvements. You’re willing to follow a problem across storage, services, and client code rather than stopping at a team boundary. - Product judgment. You’re interested in who will use what you build, not just how it works. You can turn a customer’s problem into a technical approach and recognize when a better default or simpler workflow would solve it more effectively. - Willingness to work across the stack. You bring backend depth, but you’re comfortable learning unfamiliar systems and working in client code when that’s what delivering a good experience requires. - Fluency with AI-assisted engineering. You use AI to accelerate exploration, implementation, and testing while taking responsibility for understanding and validating the result. NICE TO HAVES: - Experience managing fleets of databases or building database platforms, including provisioning, upgrades, backups, and recovery. - Deep Postgres expertise, such as advanced query optimization, performance tuning, or workload isolation for large datasets and high-concurrency workloads. - Experience building query layers, sync engines, change-data-capture pipelines, permission systems, or other reusable data abstractions. 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, the estimated base salary range for this role is $234,000 – $352,000 per year. By clicking “Submit Application”, I understand and agree that Notion and its affiliates and subsidiaries will collect and process my information in accordance with Notion’s Global Recruiting Privacy Policy https://notion.notion.site/Notion-Global-Recruiting-Privacy-Policy-fc3eb4e829354a26a2bb6fd5e289b550. https://dev.notion.so/a3ce416456924276a59de91bca740028?pvs=21 #LI-Onsite 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. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & ACCOMMODATIONS We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply. Notion is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. Consistent with applicable law, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Notion provides reasonable accommodations during the application process; if you need one, please let your recruiter know. Notion is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Notion considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Notion is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.