Engineering Manager Search & Context Platform

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.

Notion's Search & Context Platform is the substrate that powers how 100M+ users and increasingly Notion's agents find and reason over the right information. This team owns the search infrastructure and indexing systems powering lexical and semantic retrieval the platform primitives for managing agent context and memories and the scalability performance security and enterprise capabilities that make all of it production-grade.

Data growth is faster than ever and the systems that power this need to rapidly evolve to support an order of magnitude growth—both in the volume of content we index and in the load that agents now place on the retrieval layer.

As the Engineering Manager for this team you'll lead a technically deep group of engineers building platform systems used by multiple product teams. Your most important customers are the Search & Context product team and the AI team (building agents on top of these primitives). You'll set the technical direction product manage the platform scope on behalf of those customers and make hard tradeoffs to move fast in service of product velocity — while keeping the platform sustainable reliable and secure.

• Lead a high-performing platform team responsible for search infrastructure (lexical & semantic) indexing (including streaming & batch data pipelines) retrieval (lexical + semantic + hybrid) and the context/memory primitives that power Notion's agents.

• Set a clear roadmap that balances foundational platform investments (latency cost reliability scalability freshness completeness security enterprise readiness) with fast iteration on indexing new entities/features and building new context capabilities for agents.

• Operate the platform with a high reliability bar: SLOs deep observability on-call health early-warning signals and prevention-first incident/post-mortem practices and drive measurable improvements to search and context quality performance and reliability for Notion's largest customers and o

• Partner and build closely with the Search & Context product team the AI team and other consumers of the platform on the right interfaces capabilities and commitments.

• Staying ahead of the needs of your customer teams by anticipating where the product is going investing in capacity capabilities and primitives and making sure the platform accelerates product velocity.

• Build and lead the team through hiring coaching feedback growth and creating an environment where strong technical ICs do their best work.

• Contribute to Notion's broader engineering practices around platform design reliability on-call and AI-era infrastructure.

• 4+ years of experience leading engineering teams with a track record of shipping high-quality systems in a fast-paced environment.

• A technically leaning management style—you stay close to the code and the design can credibly debate architecture and tradeoffs with senior ICs and raise the technical bar of your team.

• Sufficient depth in search retrieval or large-scale data/indexing systems: lexical search (e.g. BM25) semantic search (embeddings ANN/vector indexes) big data pipelines hybrid retrieval ranking and the surrounding infrastructure.

• Experience product managing a platform or infrastructure scope: continuous evaluation technical architecture SLAs and a roadmap on behalf of internal customer teams and making prioritization calls when those customers want different things.

• Strong systems judgment around scalability performance security build vs buy and enterprise readiness—you've shipped systems that had to be fast cheap secure and reliable at scale not just functional.

• A bias for making hard tradeoffs to unblock product velocity while protecting the long-term health of the platform; comfortable saying "yes with these constraints" or "no here's the better path."

• Experience working closely with product and AI teams as customers of a platform—you can speak both languages and translate between them.

• High tolerance for ambiguity and rapid change; you enjoy operating in a space where both the product surface (agents AI) and the underlying technology (retrieval LLMs) are evolving quickly.

• Experience building agentic or tool-using systems or platforms that serve LLM-based products.

• Familiarity with permissioned multi-tenant enterprise data—ACL-aware indexing retrieval and audit.

• Understanding of classic information retrieval metrics ranking or applied ML.

• Has led teams through rapid scope and priority changes and evolving org boundaries.

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 $280000 - $330000 per year.

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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.

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.

What We Do

Notion blends your everyday work tools into one. Product roadmap? Company wiki? Meeting notes? With Notion they're all in one place and totally customizable to meet the needs of any workflow. It's the all-in-one workspace for you your team and your whole company. Mission: We humans are toolmakers by nature but most of us can't build or modify the software we use every day — arguably our most powerful tool. Here at Notion we're on a mission to make it possible for everyone to shape the tools that shape their lives.

Why Work With Us

Here at Notion our work shapes our culture and our culture inspires our work. We seek to hire creative toolmakers that want to be the best in their craft. If every employee is able to focus on being the best toolmaker in their craft we'll be able to achieve our mission of enabling the world to better solve its problems.

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