Strong backend engineering fundamentals, with interest in performance, reliability, scalability, and systems that need to hold up under real customer load
Curiosity about distributed systems, microservices, and data-layer trade-offs; experience in these areas is helpful, but we care most about your ability to learn quickly and reason from first principles
Practical comfort with JavaScript or TypeScript, or the ability to ramp quickly in a codebase where those tools matter
Grit and truth-seeking in technical problem solving: you can iterate when the first approach does not move P50/P95 performance, and you’re motivated by finding the real bottleneck
A self-guided learning style: you use docs, code, teammates, and AI to build context, ask better questions, and turn ambiguity into steady progress
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
By your 90th day, you’ll understand how Collections Infra supports Notion’s database block, ship improvements to database performance or reliability, and build context on the scale challenges behind larger enterprise workspaces and AI-driven write volume
You’ll use AI as a real engineering collaborator: to learn unfamiliar systems faster, explore debugging paths, generate tests, summarize traces or logs, and pressure-test implementation plans before shipping
You’ll contribute to the team’s work to make databases faster and more reliable at P95 scale, especially as customers build larger centralized databases with more concurrent usage
By the end of your first year, you’ll have helped raise the quality bar for Collections infrastructure through better architecture, observability, documentation, or system boundaries that make future work easier to build on
You’ll partner with senior engineers and product-facing teams to evolve Collections as a platform, balancing internal developer needs with the external customer experience of databases