Notion · United States
Join our team as a Software Engineer focused on User Database Infrastructure. In this role, you will build systems that enable knowledge workers to leverage fast, scalable databases without needing to become a DBA. You will be a hands-on technical leader, shaping the architectural direction and roadmap as we take a new product from early alpha to general availability. You will work directly with early customers to influence foundational technical and product decisions, and together we will scale as adoption and workloads grow. This is a backend-leaning role with work spanning the stack, and you will have the opportunity to make a significant impact on our product and customers.
- 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
- 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
- Fluency with AI-assisted engineering. You use AI to accelerate exploration, implementation, and testing while taking responsibility for understanding and validating the result
- 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
- 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
- If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply
- Experience building query layers, sync engines, change-data-capture pipelines, permission systems, or other reusable data abstractions
- 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