Software Engineer, User Database Infrastructure

Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . 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.

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.

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