Software Engineer, Early Career (AI)

Notion•San Francisco, CA

2d•$130,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Notion is seeking an Early Career AI Engineer to join as a strategic partner in shaping Notion's AI vision. This role involves working on cutting-edge AI-powered features, leveraging LLMs, embeddings, and other AI technologies to enhance Notion's intelligence and capabilities. The position may be aligned with various AI-focused teams, including AI product engineering (building model-powered features end-to-end), Model & systems engineering (improving model integration and performance), and Evaluation & quality (creating evaluation frameworks and testing). As an engineer at Notion, you will help shape core user experiences, tackle meaningful challenges with increasing autonomy, craft code used by millions, take ownership of projects, make critical technical decisions, and contribute to the product vision alongside design, product, and data experts.

Requirements

Less than two years of engineering experience.
Solid fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Customer-minded, pragmatic approach to solving problems.
Excited to build and iterate quickly, with exploration of AI/ML through coursework, projects, internships, or hackathons.
Comfortable learning how different parts of a product fit together (UI, APIs, data).
Some familiarity with relational databases like Postgres or MySQL.
Ability to take an idea from prototype to a working feature with guidance.
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.
Ability to navigate ambiguity successfully and decompose complex problems into clean solutions.
Balance the business impact of what you're building.
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.
Pragmatic about choosing the right tool for the job, focusing on what delivers the most value to users and the business.
Own your work, communicating clearly about progress and blockers.
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 Haves

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.
Heard of computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others—and understand why we're big fans of their work.

Responsibilities

Partner with your team to prototype and ship an AI-powered product improvement.
Own a scoped productionization project: integrate a new model/technique into an existing workflow, add monitoring + guardrails, or improve latency/cost/reliability.
Contribute to evals and iteration loops: build or extend an evaluation set, run experiments, analyze results, and translate learnings into product or system changes.