Software Engineer, Search

About Us:

We're on a mission to make it possible for every person, team, and company to be able to tailor their software to solve any problem and take on any challenge. Computers may be our most powerful tools, but most of us can't build or modify the software we use on them every day. At Notion, we want to change this with focus, design, and craft.

We've been working on this together since 2016, and have customers like Pixar, Mitsubishi, Figma, Plaid, Match Group, and thousands more on this journey with us. Today, we're growing fast and excited for new teammates to join us who are the best at what they do. We're passionate about building a company as diverse and creative as the millions of people Notion reaches worldwide.

Notion is an in person company, and currently requires its employees to come to the office for two Anchor Days (Mondays & Thursdays) and requests that employees spend the majority of their week in the office (including a third day).

About The Role:

Notion is looking for talented engineers to join our search team. This team is responsible for ensuring that, wherever in the application our users need to find documents, they’ll get back the most relevant ones, as quickly as possible. You will delight our users by helping define and improve our approach to full-text indexing, retrieval, ranking, personalization and semantic searching.

What You'll Achieve:

• You’ll build best-in-class search and retrieval systems used by millions of users across billions of documents
• You’ll improve search relevancy using creative, cutting-edge techniques from both industry and new research
• You’ll ensure the reliability and correctness of our distributed real-time indexing pipeline, indexing every change made to every document in all of Notion
• You’ll find ways, big and small, to leverage AI and LLMs to help users find the most important and relevant information in their Notion workspaces
• You’ll collaborate with product engineers across Notion to provide search functionality in their product features.

Skills You'll Need to Bring:

• You have experience in:
  • backend engineering;
  • data infrastructure;
  • search infrastructure;
  • natural language processing, or
  • machine learning for ranking / classification
• You have a track record for shipping scalable and reliable user-facing products
• You thrive when collaborating cross-functionally — especially with product, design, infrastructure or data teams
• You have a computer science background or equivalent technical experience

Nice to Haves:

• You have experience building full-text search using, e.g: Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr
• You have experience building fully productionized machine learning systems
• You have experience with designing, building and maintaining complex distributed systems
• You have experience with large scale data processing technologies, e.g: Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow, YARN/Hadoop
• You have implemented semantic search systems
• You have worked at a fast-growing start-up, a SaaS company, or are eager to contribute in such an environment (being a current Notion user would be great!)
• 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.

We hire talented and passionate people from a variety of backgrounds because we want our global employee base to represent the wide diversity of our customers. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every bullet point listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply. If you’re a builder at heart, share our company values, and enthusiastic about making software toolmaking ubiquitous, we want to hear from you.

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 made due to a disability, please let your recruiter know. Notion is committed to providing highly competitive cash compensation, equity, and benefits. The compensation offered for this role will be based on multiple factors such as location, the role’s scope and complexity, and the candidate’s experience and expertise, and may vary from the range provided below. For roles based in New York, the estimated base salary range for this role is $130,000 - $250,000 per year.

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