Software Engineer, Data Platform (Foundations Lead)

About this role

Software Engineer, Data Platform (Foundations Lead)

Notion

📍 San Francisco, California🌍 Remote💼 FullTime🕒 Posted 2d ago

SparkKafkaEMRAthenaIceberg

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About this role

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 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. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. 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. WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE:

• 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. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING:
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. 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 WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS 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. 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, the estimated base salary range for this role is $281,000 - $334,000 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. 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.