Software Engineer, Collections Infra

Notion•San Francisco, CA

23h•$150,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Software Engineer on Collections Infra, you’ll help scale the infrastructure behind Notion’s database block. Databases power views, boards, charts, forms, and the workflows customers use to run their companies; as Notion grows into larger enterprise deployments and AI-native work, those systems need to become faster, more reliable, and ready for much higher concurrency. This team sits between infrastructure and product, building backend architecture that improves the customer experience while becoming a platform other Notion teams can build on. You’ll work on problems like database load performance, microservices, high-volume writes from agents, and the flexibility that makes Notion databases powerful and hard to scale. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. 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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

Experience in distributed systems, microservices, and data-layer trade-offs.

Responsibilities

Help scale the infrastructure behind Notion’s database block.
Build backend architecture that improves the customer experience while becoming a platform other Notion teams can build on.
Work on problems like database load performance, microservices, high-volume writes from agents, and the flexibility that makes Notion databases powerful and hard to scale.
Ship improvements to database performance or reliability.
Build context on the scale challenges behind larger enterprise workspaces and AI-driven write volume.
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.
Help raise the quality bar for Collections infrastructure through better architecture, observability, documentation, or system boundaries that make future work easier to build on.
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.