Software Engineer, Primitive Foundations

Notion • San Francisco, CA

1d • $150,000 - $240,000 • Onsite

About The Position

As a Software Engineer on Primitive Foundations, you will work across the stack to design, build, and evolve Notion’s core building blocks. Your work will directly shape how teams use Notion to create their own tools—for docs and wikis, issue tracking, project management, CRMs, dashboards, and more. Your work may include both internal platform contributions to accelerate other Notion engineering teams, and end-user facing products to enable toolmaking ubiquity. The team acts as a multiplier for the engineering organization and helps evolve the product.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional experience (or equivalent): You’ve shipped meaningful product features to tens of thousands of users, and have taken multiple complex projects from design through launch. We’re open to less tenure for exceptional candidates with strong signal.
• Full-stack product engineering experience: You are comfortable working in TypeScript and React on the frontend, and in Node.js or similar environments on the backend. You care about data modeling, API design, and how things are built end‑to‑end.
• Strong UI and UX sensibilities: You like spending time in the product, thinking about interaction details, and collaborating closely with designers and PMs to produce high-quality user experiences.
• Systems thinking: You naturally look for abstractions and patterns. You enjoy understanding how product and technical systems fit together, and you design solutions that scale across many use cases—not just the one immediately in front of you.
• Excellent collaboration and communication: You work well with engineers, PMs, designers, and GTM partners. You can explain complex technical ideas in clear language, and you engage thoughtfully with different perspectives.
• Deep familiarity with Notion: You’ve used Notion regularly for 1+ year, and you are a power user who understands its strengths, limitations, and pain points. You’ve built your own systems (databases, views, dashboards, or templates) and have ideas on how the primitives could be better.

Nice To Haves

• High agency and ownership: You’re comfortable working through ambiguity, proactively identifying what needs to be done, and driving projects forward. Side projects, open source, or examples of self-directed work are a plus.
• Experience with tools for thought or adjacent products: You have experience building flexible, composable tools that let users create their own productivity workflows.
• Talking to users: You’re comfortable (and energized by) talking directly to customers or internal stakeholders, and using that feedback to shape your work.
• Breadth of interests: You have interests beyond pure engineering—such as design, writing, education, or other creative fields—and you bring that perspective into how you think about product and systems.

Responsibilities

• Shape Notion’s primitives: Work on the foundational pieces of Notion’s building blocks—such as databases, views, and layout systems—so they can support more complex and demanding workflows over time.
• Turn use cases into systems: Partner with other product teams to decompose user problems into primitive-level improvements, and design solutions that can be reused across many product areas.
• Ship impactful, user-facing products: Build polished, high-quality experiences in TypeScript and React that are used by millions of people, and iterate based on feedback and data.
• Multiply other teams: Create documentation, patterns, and APIs that make it easier for other teams at Notion to understand, extend, and compose primitives correctly.
• Improve reliability and performance: Identify and deliver technical investments that make our primitive systems more robust, observable, and performant as Notion scales.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed