Engineering Manager, Search Quality & Ranking

Notion • San Francisco, CA

40d • $247,000 - $290,000 • Onsite

About The Position

As the Engineering Manager for our Search Quality & Ranking team, you'll lead a team of engineers to build and improve the search experience that millions of Notion users rely on every day. As Notion scales-supporting over 100 million customers-search becomes even more critical. Search at Notion is critical infrastructure that powers not just the navigational user experience, but also serves as the foundation and memory for our AI capabilities. You'll guide the team's work on search ranking algorithms, query understanding, AI-powered connector search, and experimentation that help us continuously improve search quality at scale. As we move scale to larger enterprises, the ability to effectively search across sprawling workspaces with hundreds or thousands of pages becomes crucial to making Notion's collaboration experience scale. This is a role for someone who is passionate about the craft of building great search experiences and understands that reliability and functional accuracy are just as important as cutting-edge features.

Requirements

• You have 2+ years of experience managing engineering teams working on search, ranking, relevance, or related areas. You have a deep understanding of what it takes to build and maintain high-quality search experiences at scale-handling workspaces with millions of pages, thousands of users, and sub-3-second query times.
• You have a sufficiently deep background in search quality, ranking algorithms, and experimentation methodologies to ask the right questions and think through tradeoffs, guiding team members to do their best work along the way.
• You understand that search is mission-critical infrastructure-you're excited about the work even when it involves unglamorous bug fixes and reliability improvements, not just cutting-edge ML features.
• You're excited about the evolving landscape of AI-powered search, including working with modern embedding models, hybrid lexical-semantic search architectures, integrating LLMs into search experiences, building connector search for third-party data sources, and exploring multimodal search capabilities. You understand that search isn't just a standalone feature-it's the memory and context engine that makes Notion AI uniquely capable of delivering workspace-aware answers.
• You create team environments that are at once collaborative, empowering, supportive, and challenging-ones where engineers do their best work.
• You value empathetic and direct communication enabling you to give and receive feedback effectively and create alignment cross-functionally or cross-teams.
• You have a high tolerance for ambiguity and change. You enjoy jumping into whatever areas need attention and learning as you go.
• You're passionate about line management responsibilities and building a strong, cohesive team culture.

Nice To Haves

• You have experience with AI connectors, enterprise search, or building search experiences across multiple data sources.
• You have experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based features or integrating LLM-powered capabilities into search systems.
• You've built or managed teams responsible for experimentation and A/B testing frameworks for search.
• You have managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change.
• You have experience rolling out engineering and management practices and processes-e.g., code review, performance reviews, and levels and ladders-where they didn't exist before.
• You've heard of computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others-and understand why we're big fans of their work.

Responsibilities

• You'll build and manage a diverse and inclusive team of 5-7 engineers working on search ranking, query understanding, and search UX. You'll create a healthy environment in your team that embodies Notion's values.
• You'll recruit, coach, and develop engineers; you'll ensure engineers are regularly receiving feedback and are making progress on personal and professional goals. You don't shy away from performance conversations and recognize the relationship between objective feedback and career growth.
• You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional peers to set the direction of your team, responding to user feedback to improve search quality and relevance across Notion's core product and AI connectors.
• You'll facilitate planning-the prioritization, sequencing, and staffing of work-for your team, balancing immediate reliability needs with longer-term search quality improvements.
• You'll keep the team accountable and ensure the team is consistently working on the most important things that deliver value to Notion users, whether that's meeting the growing complexity of user questions or building new ranking capabilities that help users find exactly what they need.
• You'll be responsible for maintaining a high-quality bar for everything your team builds, with particular attention to search reliability, latency, and relevance metrics.
• You'll be accountable for driving project execution, using data to make decisions about prioritization and impact. You have a real passion for experimentation and will help the team build the infrastructure and practices needed to measure and improve search quality systematically.
• You'll work with the rest of the Engineering team to shape how Notion's engineering organization works-you'll help develop our technical practices, recruiting and onboarding strategy, planning and prioritization process, and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Industry: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees