About the Position

Software Engineer, Early Career

San Francisco, California

About the Role

As an Early Career Software Engineer at Notion, you’ll help shape core user experiences and accelerate how people discover value in Notion. You'll tackle meaningful challenges with increasing autonomy, crafting code that millions of users will experience. You'll take ownership of projects that matter, make critical technical decisions, and contribute your unique perspective to our product vision. Working alongside passionate experts across design, product, and data, you'll help shape the future of how people work.

We’re hiring early career engineers to join us across several teams at Notion. Your recruiter will partner with you to find the team that aligns best with your interests and where you can make the highest impact.

Responsibilities

Plan, build, and ship product features from conception to launch, then iterate based on insights and customer feedback.
Improve performance, reliability, and quality of key experiences used by millions of users and thousands of organizations.
Run experiments that drive activation, retention, collaboration, and revenue, partnering with design, data science, and research.
Build internal tools and platform improvements that help all engineers ship quickly and safely.
Contribute to team norms, code quality, and a culture of learning and thoughtful tradeoffs.

Areas You Might Work On

Core Notion product features: Help develop, improve, and maintain features for our flagship product, focusing on the editor, databases, sharing, or other key areas that power millions of workflows.
AI and automation: Help develop and integrate intelligent features that make Notion more powerful, contextual, and efficient for our users.
Growth and activation: Work on features that help new users discover Notion's value, improve onboarding experiences, and increase user engagement.
Platform and infrastructure: Contribute to the systems that power Notion's backend services, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance as our user base grows.

Requirements

Less than two years of engineering experience.
Solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Thoughtful problem-solving: Approach problems holistically, starting with a clear and accurate understanding of the context. Think about the implications of what you're building and how it will impact real people's lives. Navigate ambiguity successfully, decompose complex problems into clean solutions, while also balancing the business impact of what you’re building.
Impact-driven approach to technology: See technologies as tools to achieve user impact rather than ends in themselves. Care more about building successful systems that solve real problems than about using specific tech stacks or following trends. Stay current with the latest tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and other AI-assisted development environments, and be pragmatic about choosing the right tool for the job, focusing on what delivers the most value to users and the business.
Proactive communication and high agency: Own your work, communicating clearly about progress and blockers. Don't wait for instructions for every step but rather show initiative in identifying what needs to be done and driving projects forward. Ask questions when needed while independently finding solutions to problems.

Nice to Have

Experience with any part of our technology stack: React, TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, and Elasticsearch.
Care about the interaction between technology and society, the ways in which they inform each other, and our responsibility as technologists to be conscious of that relationship.
Familiarity with computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others.

We Offer

Competitive salary: $130,000 - $150,000 (based on multiple factors such as location, role’s scope and complexity, and the candidate’s experience and expertise).
Equity and benefits.
On-site work location.

About the Company

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.

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.

Equal Opportunity & Accommodations

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.

Software Engineer, Early Career

Job description