Engineering Manager, Search & Context Platform

Job description

WHO WE ARE Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpYpWfEK5s. We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. ABOUT THE ROLE Notion's Search & Context Platform is the substrate that powers how 100M+ users and, increasingly, Notion's agents find and reason over the right information. This team owns the search infrastructure and indexing systems powering lexical and semantic retrieval, the platform primitives for managing agent context and memories, and the scalability, performance, security, and enterprise capabilities that make all of it production-grade. Data growth is faster than ever, and the systems that power this need to rapidly evolve to support an order of magnitude growth—both in the volume of content we index and in the load that agents now place on the retrieval layer. As the Engineering Manager for this team, you'll lead a technically deep group of engineers building platform systems used by multiple product teams. Your most important customers are the Search & Context product team and the AI team (building agents on top of these primitives). You'll set the technical direction, product manage the platform scope on behalf of those customers, and make hard tradeoffs to move fast in service of product velocity — while keeping the platform sustainable, reliable, and secure. WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE: - Lead a high-performing platform team responsible for search infrastructure (lexical & semantic), indexing (including streaming & batch data pipelines), retrieval (lexical + semantic + hybrid), and the context/memory primitives that power Notion's agents. - Set a clear roadmap that balances foundational platform investments (latency, cost, reliability, scalability, freshness, completeness, security, enterprise readiness) with fast iteration on indexing new entities/features and building new context capabilities for agents. - Operate the platform with a high reliability bar: SLOs, deep observability, on-call health, early-warning signals, and prevention-first incident/post-mortem practices and drive measurable improvements to search and context quality, performance, and reliability for Notion's largest customers and o - Partner and build closely with the Search & Context product team, the AI team, and other consumers of the platform on the right interfaces, capabilities, and commitments. - Staying ahead of the needs of your customer teams by anticipating where the product is going, investing in capacity, capabilities, and primitives and making sure the platform accelerates product velocity. - Build and lead the team through hiring, coaching, feedback, growth, and creating an environment where strong technical ICs do their best work. - Contribute to Notion's broader engineering practices around platform design, reliability, on-call, and AI-era infrastructure. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING: - 4+ years of experience leading engineering teams with a track record of shipping high-quality systems in a fast-paced environment. - A technically leaning management style—you stay close to the code and the design, can credibly debate architecture and tradeoffs with senior ICs, and raise the technical bar of your team. - Sufficient depth in search, retrieval, or large-scale data/indexing systems: lexical search (e.g. BM25), semantic search (embeddings, ANN/vector indexes), big data pipelines, hybrid retrieval, ranking, and the surrounding infrastructure. - Experience product managing a platform or infrastructure scope: continuous evaluation technical architecture, SLAs, and a roadmap on behalf of internal customer teams, and making prioritization calls when those customers want different things. - Strong systems judgment around scalability, performance, security, build vs buy and enterprise readiness—you've shipped systems that had to be fast, cheap, secure, and reliable at scale, not just functional. - A bias for making hard tradeoffs to unblock product velocity while protecting the long-term health of the platform; comfortable saying "yes, with these constraints" or "no, here's the better path." - Experience working closely with product and AI teams as customers of a platform—you can speak both languages and translate between them. - High tolerance for ambiguity and rapid change; you enjoy operating in a space where both the product surface (agents, AI) and the underlying technology (retrieval, LLMs) are evolving quickly. NICE TO HAVES: - Experience building agentic or tool-using systems, or platforms that serve LLM-based products. - Familiarity with permissioned, multi-tenant enterprise data—ACL-aware indexing, retrieval, and audit. - Understanding of classic information retrieval metrics, ranking, or applied ML. - Has led teams through rapid scope and priority changes and evolving org boundaries. 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 San Francisco or New York City, the estimated base salary range for this role is $280,000 - $330,000 per year. By clicking “Submit Application”, I understand and agree that Notion and its affiliates and subsidiaries will collect and process my information in accordance with Notion’s Global Recruiting Privacy Policy https://notion.notion.site/Notion-Global-Recruiting-Privacy-Policy-fc3eb4e829354a26a2bb6fd5e289b550 and and NYLL 144 https://notion.notion.site/Ashby-AI-Bias-Audit-2b0efdeead05803bbbfae159ec86c528. #LI-Onsite A NOTE ON AI 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. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement — when that’s the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don’t treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY & ACCOMMODATIONS 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. Notion is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. Consistent with applicable law, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Notion provides reasonable accommodations during the application process; if you need one, please let your recruiter know. 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 due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.