The opportunity
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…
What you'll do
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.
What they're looking for
- 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.
