Forward Deployed Engineer, India

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 is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer focused on migrations to join our growing team in India. You will help deliver complex, production-grade data migrations, integrations, and automations for customers across APAC. This is initially an internally focused, hands-on engineering role. You will partner closely with regional Forward Deployed Engineers, who own customer discovery, solution architecture, stakeholder communication, risk management, and final customer validation. You will own the behind-the-scenes technical execution layer from feasibility assessment and implementation through testing, production rollout, QA, reconciliation, reporting, and operational handoff. You will work across multiple customer environments and source systems, often with incomplete requirements, imperfect data, and real-world constraints. Success requires strong engineering fundamentals, sound judgment, careful validation, and the ability to turn one-off delivery work into reusable tools and repeatable playbooks. As a founding engineer in India, you will help build a new regional engineering capability from the ground up. You will create migration infrastructure, standards, and reusable tooling used by FDEs across APAC, while establishing practices that can scale globally. The role offers an opportunity to become a technical authority for production migration delivery, shaping how Notion approaches reliability, validation, and operational quality across complex customer environments. As the team grows, the role may also expand toward customer-facing FDE work, technical leadership, or a deeper engineering path, depending on business needs and demonstrated capability. # What You'll Achieve: - Own the technical execution layer after customer requirements, scope, and solution architecture have been established with the regional FDE. Contribute to feasibility assessment, estimation, implementation planning, and risk identification while the regional FDE remains accountable for customer discovery, scope, architecture, stakeholder communication, and final acceptance. - Apply a repeatable migration lifecycle covering source inventory and sampling, scope and pruning decisions, compatibility and degradation assessment, transformation design, pilot or dry run, user acceptance testing, production cutover, reconciliation, remediation, hypercare, and documented handoff. - Translate approved customer and regional FDE requirements into clear technical designs, implementation plans, test strategies, runbooks, and delivery estimates. - Build production-quality migration utilities, backend services, data pipelines, integrations, and automations using Python, SQL, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure. - Investigate source-system behavior, data quality issues, permissions, rate limits, authentication constraints, and edge cases, then recommend practical solutions. - Design and validate permissions, ownership, and inheritance mappings against the approved migration plan. Make unsupported or ambiguous access requirements explicit, obtain the required decision or approval, and preserve evidence of validation. - Design migrations for reliability, scale, security, observability, idempotency, failure recovery, and safe reruns. - Execute migrations only through approved environments, devices, accounts, and tooling. Follow least-privilege access, customer-specific security and data-residency requirements, and approved handling procedures. Do not store customer data in unmanaged local or external systems, and escalate privacy, security, or sovereignty concerns before execution. - Build validation and reconciliation frameworks that provide clear evidence of migration completeness, accuracy, and exceptions. - Debug failures across application code, infrastructure, customer data, third-party systems, and the Notion platform, then drive issues through resolution. - Manage multiple implementation workstreams, dependencies, and priorities while communicating scope, progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly. - Surface scope changes, unsupported requirements, timeline risks, and material effort increases early. Document assumptions and trade-offs, and escalate with options and a recommended path rather than silently absorbing additional work. - Maintain an auditable record of scope, decisions, risks, approvals, validation evidence, and customer acceptance criteria in the agreed shared workspace or channel. - Convert repeated delivery patterns into reusable components, automation, documentation, and playbooks that improve speed, quality, and cost over time. - Bring field learnings back to Notion's Product and Engineering teams as actionable platform feedback and technical requirements. # Skills You'll Need to Bring: - 3 to 6 years of hands-on experience in backend engineering, data engineering, integration engineering, implementation engineering, technical consulting, solutions engineering, or a similar technical role. - Strong hands-on Python development experience. - Working experience with Node.js, JavaScript, or TypeScript. - Strong SQL skills and a solid understanding of relational databases, data modeling, and data transformation. - Experience working with REST APIs, JSON, authentication, webhooks, and system integrations. - Experience owning a production migration, integration, or technical implementation through mapping, transformation, testing, rollout, validation, and handoff. - Experience taking a technical problem from requirements and design through development, testing, deployment, and production operation. - Experience with Git, code review, automated testing, release practices, and production deployment. - Strong debugging, analytical, and problem-solving skills across code, data, infrastructure, and external systems. - Evidence of working on production systems, not only prototypes or proof-of-concept projects. - Clear written and verbal English communication, with the ability to explain technical decisions, constraints, and risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders. - High agency and ownership. You are comfortable making progress with incomplete information, challenging assumptions, and escalating with options and a recommendation. # Nice to Haves: - Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, job orchestration, or infrastructure automation. - Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure. - Familiarity with message queues, event-driven systems, distributed-system patterns, retries, concurrency, and rate limits. - Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, or other observability tools. - Experience with enterprise SaaS applications, professional services, or large-scale customer implementations. - Experience migrating large volumes of content or structured data between enterprise platforms. - Experience with AI or LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, or agentic workflows. - Familiarity with MCP, tool calling, Notion Workers, Custom Agents, or similar extensibility platforms. - Experience working with distributed global or APAC teams. # What success looks like: **In your first 90 days, you will:** - Learn Notion's migration and implementation ecosystem, engineering standards, and APAC delivery model. - Establish a productive working rhythm with regional FDE partners. - Contribute to at least one migration or integration workstream through production delivery. - Leave behind clear technical documentation, validation evidence, and an operational runbook. **Within your first six months, you will:** - Independently own production migration or integration workstreams from technical design through rollout and handoff. - Deliver measurable improvements in migration turnaround time, validation quality, delivery cost, or regional FDE execution hours through reusable engineering. - Help establish repeatable quality controls, code review practices, runbooks, and observability patterns for the India team. - Demonstrate effective prioritization and communication across multiple concurrent APAC engagements. - Turn at least one repeated delivery pattern into a reusable tool, component, or playbook that is adopted by a subsequent engagement. ## Location: This role is based in Hyderabad, India. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, our Anchor Days, because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We're looking for someone who's excited to work alongside the team during those days. 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)[.](https://dev.notion.so/a3ce416456924276a59de91bca740028?pvs=21) #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.