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Salary: USD 299,000 - 334,000 / annual
Notion is building a collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together. This role focuses on database infrastructure that enables knowledge workers to leverage fast, scalable databases without becoming DBAs.
You will be a hands-on technical leader helping set architectural direction and roadmap as a new product moves from early alpha to general availability. Working directly with early customers, you'll shape foundational technical and product decisions, then scale as adoption grows.
This is a backend-leaning role spanning the stack. You might build systems that provision and manage customer Postgres instances, design how user-defined schemas evolve safely, or optimize complex query execution. You'll also follow these systems into the product layer: improving table loading performance, helping users understand slow operations, or enabling agents to safely work with data.
You'll shape both architecture and product. Some problems require better abstractions, others better defaults, and others rethinking what users are asked to do. You'll work with teammates and customers to find answers, ship practical solutions, and evolve them as usage grows.
Key achievements include: taking a new product from alpha to GA; making real customer workloads fast through query optimization and indexing; building systems businesses can trust with their data (schema changes, concurrent writes, permissions, recovery); making powerful capabilities approachable; and automating database provisioning and fleet operations for scale.
The tech stack includes Postgres, Go, TypeScript, Node.js, and React. The role is based in San Francisco with anchor days (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday) in the office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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
- Production relational database experience (Postgres or MySQL): schema and index decisions, performance analysis, debugging transactions/locking/concurrency; experience beyond ORM-level access
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals: building services that remain correct under concurrency and failure; reasoning about retries, partial failures, consistency, and trade-offs in reliable reads/writes
- Systematic approach to performance: using query plans, traces, profiles, and experiments to find bottlenecks and verify improvements; willingness to follow problems across storage, services, and client code
- Product judgment: understanding who will use what you build; turning customer problems into technical approaches; recognizing when better defaults or simpler workflows solve problems more effectively
- Willingness to work across the stack: backend depth with comfort learning unfamiliar systems and working in client code when needed
- Fluency with AI-assisted engineering: using AI to accelerate exploration, implementation, and testing while taking responsibility for understanding and validating results
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience managing fleets of databases or building database platforms (provisioning, upgrades, backups, recovery)
- Deep Postgres expertise (advanced query optimization, performance tuning, workload isolation for large datasets and high-concurrency)
- Experience building query layers, sync engines, change-data-capture pipelines, permission systems, or other reusable data abstractions
