Software Engineer, Primitive Foundations

ABOUT US:

Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organizations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.

In-person collaboration is essential to Notion's culture. We require all team members to work from our offices on Mondays and Thursdays, our designated Anchor Days. Certain teams or positions may require additional in-office workdays.

ABOUT THE TEAM:

Notion’s flexibility comes from a small set of powerful primitives—our core software building blocks that can be composed into many different products.

By primitives and building blocks, we mean things like:

- Databases and views that represent data and UI, and power use cases from project management and CRMs to posts feeds and reporting.

- Pages, comments, reactions, permissions, and teamspaces that define how information is structured, shared, and discussed.

- The underlying product and technical systems that let these primitives be reused, extended, and packaged into solutions for different customers.

The Primitive Foundations team exists to make these building blocks more robust, reusable, and understandable across Notion. We:

- Help decompose new product ideas and use-cases into the right primitive solutions.

- Build and evolve those primitives so they work well across many product surfaces.

- Partner closely with other product teams, designers, and product managers to turn primitives into complete products that customers love.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

As a Software Engineer on Primitive Foundations, you will work across the stack to design, build, and evolve Notion’s core building blocks. Your work will directly shape how teams use Notion to create their own tools—for docs and wikis, issue tracking, project management, CRMs, dashboards, and more.

Your work may include both internal platform contributions to accelerate other Notion engineering teams, and end-user facing products to enable toolmaking ubiquity. The team acts as a multiplier for the engineering organization and helps evolve the product.

WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE:

- Shape Notion’s primitives: Work on the foundational pieces of Notion’s building blocks—such as databases, views, and layout systems—so they can support more complex and demanding workflows over time.

- Turn use cases into systems: Partner with other product teams to decompose user problems into primitive-level improvements, and design solutions that can be reused across many product areas.

- Ship impactful, user-facing products: Build polished, high-quality experiences in TypeScript and React that are used by millions of people, and iterate based on feedback and data.

- Multiply other teams: Create documentation, patterns, and APIs that make it easier for other teams at Notion to understand, extend, and compose primitives correctly.

- Improve reliability and performance: Identify and deliver technical investments that make our primitive systems more robust, observable, and performant as Notion scales.

SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING:

- 3+ years of professional experience (or equivalent): You’ve shipped meaningful product features to tens of thousands of users, and have taken multiple complex projects from design through launch. We’re open to less tenure for exceptional candidates with strong signal.

- Full-stack product engineering experience: You are comfortable working in TypeScript and React on the frontend, and in Node.js or similar environments on the backend. You care about data modeling, API design, and how things are built end‑to‑end.

- Strong UI and UX sensibilities: You like spending time in the product, thinking about interaction details, and collaborating closely with designers and PMs to produce high-quality user experiences.

- Systems thinking: You naturally look for abstractions and patterns. You enjoy understanding how product and technical systems fit together, and you design solutions that scale across many use cases—not just the one immediately in front of you.

- Excellent collaboration and communication: You work well with engineers, PMs, designers, and GTM partners. You can explain complex technical ideas in clear language, and you engage thoughtfully with different perspectives.

- Deep familiarity with Notion: You’ve used Notion regularly for 1+ year, and you are a power user who understands its strengths, limitations, and pain points. You’ve built your own systems (databases, views, dashboards, or templates) and have ideas on how the primitives could be better.

WHAT WE’D LOVE TO SEE:

- High agency and ownership: You’re comfortable working through ambiguity, proactively identifying what needs to be done, and driving projects forward. Side projects, open source, or examples of self-directed work are a plus.

- Experience with tools for thought or adjacent products: You have experience building flexible, composable tools that let users create their own productivity workflows.

- Talking to users: You’re comfortable (and energized by) talking directly to customers or internal stakeholders, and using that feedback to shape your work.

- Breadth of interests: You have interests beyond pure engineering—such as design, writing, education, or other creative fields—and you bring that perspective into how you think about product and systems.

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.

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 $150,000 - $240,000 per year.

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