Engineering Manager (Data Platform Foundations Location) Notion
Connected workspace for docs, projects, knowledge, and AI.
Permanent
Occasional remote
281K to 334K $ a year
> 5 years
Skills we're looking for
Cross-functional team leadership
Leadership
Mechanical skills
Data engineering
Team building
+3
You'll be part of
United States of America
4671 employees
Logiciels
Our take
Managing busy workflows using fragmented systems can be a headache for both individuals and businesses. Notion aims to combat this problem by enabling users to work from one central hub, customizing their workflows to suit their exact needs. This includes managing files, scheduling tasks, saving documents, writing to-do-lists, and setting reminders. The company counts enterprise companies such as McDonald’s, The Wall Street Journal, Verizon, Samsung, and IBM as its customers. In spite of economic uncertainty, Notion reached a $2B valuation in 2020, helped by record signups as more people were forced to work from home. Its value has since risen to over 5 times this value, an impressive reflection of its success. The company has also made a number of strategic acquisitions that, coupled with its enormous market value and enviable customer list, have Notion well-placed to continue dominating the market. However, with a growing wave of competitors emerging, including offerings like Microsoft Loop, Notion will need to keep innovating and evolving to maintain its edge and stay ahead in an increasingly crowded market.
You'll be working on
- Notion’s Data Foundations team builds and operates the batch and streaming infrastructure behind our product features, analytics, search, and AI experiences
- We’re looking for a hands-on technical leader to shape the next generation of this platform as Notion serves larger customers, expands globally, and supports more data-intensive products
- You’ll identify the highest-leverage problems, set direction, build and develop a high-performing team, and lead multi-quarter initiatives across our data lake, streaming, distributed-compute, governance, and reliability systems
- You’ll stay close to critical technical decisions while creating clear ownership, growing engineers and technical leaders, and helping the team execute as one—partnering closely with Data Engineering, Data Product, Search, AI, Infrastructure, and Security
- Set the direction for Data Foundations. Turn ambiguous company and customer needs into a clear multi-quarter strategy across the data lake, streaming, distributed compute, governance, and platform reliability—and align engineers and partner teams around it
- Build and develop a high-performing team. Attract strong engineers, set clear expectations, grow technical leaders, and create an environment of ownership, direct feedback, and accountability
- Lead the team’s hardest initiatives from idea to operation. Ensure complex work has strong technical ownership, de-risk architectures through prototypes, break work into shippable milestones, and coordinate execution across engineers and teams
- Make Notion’s data platform enterprise-ready. Guide the team toward durable foundations for external key management, data residency, access controls, lifecycle management, and governance without creating separate systems for every requirement
- Raise reliability, simplicity, and cost efficiency. Identify systemic risks and architectural gaps, establish clear service ownership, and lead migrations that make Kafka, Debezium, S3/Iceberg, Spark, EMR, Athena, and related systems easier to operate at scale
- Multiply the engineering organization. Establish reusable abstractions and paved paths, delegate meaningful ownership, raise the quality of technical decisions, and scale expertise through coaching, documentation, tooling, design reviews, and direct collaboration
- The Systems and Problems You May Lead:
- Evolving Notion’s data lake toward an S3 + Iceberg lakehouse with stronger governance, discoverability, schema evolution, and lifecycle controls
- Scaling Kafka and Debezium-based streaming infrastructure that powers real-time product, analytics, and AI use cases
- Improving Spark and distributed-compute performance, workload isolation, developer experience, and cost efficiency
- Designing EKM, data residency, and compliant processing capabilities across Notion’s data estate
- Creating clear platform interfaces and self-serve primitives for Data Engineering, Search, AI, and product teams
- Notion’s data infrastructure is no longer only an internal analytics layer. It increasingly powers customer-facing features, AI systems, enterprise controls, and high-volume product workflows
- The team needs a leader who can see across these systems, build the technical leadership and operating culture required for that responsibility, and find the problems that matter before they become roadmap blockers
- Success means Data Foundations has a strong, growing team with clear direction and dependable execution—and teams across Notion can build ambitious data-powered products faster without compromising customer trust
We're looking for
- Platform-product thinking. You understand the needs behind partner requests and turn repeated patterns into safe, ergonomic, self-serve capabilities rather than accumulating bespoke solutions
- Organizational influence. You create clarity across team boundaries, surface uncomfortable technical or organizational risks early, and help engineers do their best work through strong context, delegation, feedback, and coaching
- Deep data-platform expertise. You have designed and operated large-scale batch and streaming systems and can reason across storage, compute, ingestion, orchestration, serving, governance, and production operations
- Hands-on engineering judgment. You stay close to critical systems and designs and know when to prototype, simplify, buy, build, or migrate. You can go deep while preserving ownership for the engineers leading the work
- You don’t need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect every Notino to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. People who thrive here don’t treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, move faster, and build more creatively
- Team-building and talent development. You have attracted strong engineers, grown people across career stages, developed technical leaders, and created clarity when expectations or performance needed to change
- Direction-setting leadership. You have led a Data Platform or infrastructure team through multi-quarter work—finding the right problems, defining a strategy, sequencing execution, and driving decisions with long-term consequences
- We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply