Senior Backend Engineer (Postgres)

Location: Must be based in San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: Mon, Tue, Thu in office)

Salary: $299,000 – $334,000 per year

Company

Notion is a collaborative AI workspace that integrates knowledge, projects, and tools into a single platform for millions of users.

What you will do

• Lead the architectural direction and roadmap for a new product from alpha to general availability.
• Build and manage systems for provisioning and scaling customer Postgres instances.
• Optimize query execution, indexing, and data loading to ensure performance at scale.
• Design reliable systems for schema evolution, concurrent writes, and data recovery.
• Collaborate with customers to shape foundational technical and product decisions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating production software.
• Deep expertise in relational databases (Postgres or MySQL), including schema design, performance tuning, and concurrency.
• Strong backend fundamentals with experience building services that handle complex state and failure scenarios.
• Proven track record of technical leadership and setting strategy for cross-team initiatives.
• Willingness to work across the stack, including client-side code when necessary.
• Must be based in San Francisco and able to work from the office on Anchor Days (Mon, Tue, Thu).

Nice to have

• Experience managing fleets of databases or building database platforms.
• Deep Postgres expertise in advanced query optimization and workload isolation.
• Experience building query layers, sync engines, or reusable data abstractions.

Culture & Benefits

• Highly competitive cash compensation and equity packages.
• Focus on craft, human-centric work, and building long-lasting systems.
• Collaborative environment with a strong emphasis on AI-assisted engineering.
• Commitment to diversity and equal opportunity employment.