Software Engineer, Developer Experience (Go Lead)

Staff Engineer, Developer Experience · Staff · Full Time

New York, New YorkUSD 299k – 352k1mo ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead Notion's Go language platform at production scale as a Staff-level Software Engineer focused on Developer Experience. You'll architect reliable service patterns, establish golden paths for tooling, and create guardrails that make Go development fast and safe at Notion. This role combines deep platform engineering with broader developer productivity challenges including AI-assisted workflows, CI/CD performance, and deployment reliability, requiring 10+ years of systems-level software development expertise with proven track record building production platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Go Platform Leadership: Own the vision and execution of building Notion's Go platform as a fully supported, production-ready language alongside TypeScript. Establish clear operating models, reliability patterns, and deployment frameworks that enable teams to confidently run Go services at scale.
  • Developer Experience Strategy: Define and implement paved paths for the Go tooling stack at Notion, including deployment pipelines, observability solutions, and reliability tooling. Create golden paths and guardrails that reduce developer cognitive load and accelerate service development.
  • Platform Adoption & Migration: Drive adoption of the Go platform by working directly with production teams, unblocking their service launches, and establishing best practices through real-world examples. Within 90 days, enable at least two production teams to successfully operate Go services.
  • Technical Standards & Governance: Establish safe, reliable frameworks for running Go services including deployment strategies, observability requirements, and production response playbooks. Document standards in a way that keeps developers in their flow state rather than creating administrative overhead.
  • Broader Developer Productivity: While Go is the primary focus, contribute to solving cross-cutting developer experience challenges including AI-assisted development workflows, remote agent environments, CI performance optimization, deployment automation, and reliability tooling improvements.
  • AI-Enhanced Developer Tools: Leverage AI-assisted tooling to reduce toil in service architecture, maintenance, and ownership. Explore AI-enabled scaffolding, code generation, and automation opportunities that amplify developer effectiveness and reduce repetitive work.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Work effectively with backend engineers, infrastructure teams, and product teams to ensure platform decisions align with broader engineering strategy and business priorities. Present trade-offs clearly and bring teams toward consensus without creating committee-driven design.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Production Go Expertise

    Deep hands-on experience operating production-grade Go services at scale, including service architecture, deployment patterns, and operational considerations for large-scale systems.

  • Platform Engineering

    Demonstrated track record of defining, designing, and driving adoption of developer platforms including libraries, golden paths, migration playbooks, and system guardrails that facilitate team adoption.

  • Systems-Level Software Development

    Strong systems judgment with ability to make explicit trade-offs between speed and safety, abstraction and flexibility, and communicate these decisions to cross-functional teams without creating decision paralysis.

  • Backend Service Architecture

    Expertise in designing reliable and scalable service patterns, including observability, reliability frameworks, and production-ready deployment strategies.

  • Developer Experience Optimization

    Proven ability to identify and solve high-leverage developer productivity bottlenecks through tooling, automation, and workflow optimization.

Education

  • Computer Science Fundamentals

    Strong foundation in computer science principles including systems design, data structures, and algorithms (formal degree not required; demonstrated expertise through professional experience is equivalent).

Experience

  • 10+ Years Software Development

    Over a decade of hands-on software development experience in fast-paced, dynamic environments with demonstrated growth through progressively complex technical challenges.

  • Platform Ownership

    Track record of owning and evolving internal developer platforms that other engineering teams successfully adopted and depended upon in production environments.

  • Production Operations at Scale

    Experience operating and maintaining complex systems at production scale, with understanding of reliability requirements, incident response, and operational maturity.

Skills

Required

  • Go Programming Language

    Expert-level proficiency with Go including concurrency patterns, memory management, performance optimization, and standard library mastery. Must have shipped and operated multiple production Go services.

  • Platform Engineering

    Ability to design abstractions that enable teams rather than constrain them. Experience building developer tools, libraries, and frameworks that achieve high adoption through solving real problems.

  • Distributed Systems Knowledge

    Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, partition tolerance, service communication patterns, and failure modes.

  • Production Operations

    Hands-on experience operating backend services in production including incident response, performance optimization, scaling strategies, and observability implementation.

  • Systems Thinking & Decision-Making

    Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs, weigh business impact against engineering elegance, and make pragmatic decisions that consider both short-term delivery and long-term maintainability.

  • Technical Communication

    Excellent ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders, building alignment around platform decisions.

Preferred

  • TypeScript & Node.js Ecosystem

    Nice to have

    Experience with TypeScript, particularly understanding of how to maintain code quality and performance in large-scale Node.js codebases. Useful for collaborating with Notion's existing backend stack.

  • Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

    Nice to have

    Production experience operating and maintaining Kubernetes clusters at scale, including workload management, networking, and cluster lifecycle operations.

  • AI-Assisted Development Tooling

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience using modern AI-enabled development tools for code generation, refactoring, testing, and automation. Understanding of how to integrate AI into developer workflows effectively.

  • CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code

    Nice to have

    Experience designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines, implementing infrastructure as code practices, and building automation that scales across hundreds of services.

  • Observability & Monitoring

    Nice to have

    Deep experience building observability solutions including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics collection, and dashboard design that enables rapid incident diagnosis.

  • Open Source Platform Development

    Nice to have

    Experience contributing to or maintaining open source infrastructure projects that require both engineering excellence and community management.

Tech stack

Languages

GoTypeScriptBash/Shell Scripting

Frameworks

gRPCProtocol BuffersStandard Go Libraries

Databases

PostgreSQLRedis

Tools

KubernetesDockerPrometheusGrafanaGitHub/Git

Other

Microservices ArchitectureObservability & LoggingInfrastructure as CodeAI-Enhanced Development

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 299,000 – 352,000

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Equity Compensation

    Meaningful equity grants as part of Notion's total compensation package, allowing you to participate in the company's long-term value creation.

  • Comprehensive Health Coverage

    Highly competitive health insurance benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage with company contributions.

  • Flexible Work Arrangements

    Work from San Francisco or New York City offices with required in-person presence on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays (Anchor Days) for collaborative thinking and building.

  • Professional Development

    Access to learning resources, conference attendance, and professional growth opportunities to stay current with evolving backend technologies and platform engineering practices.

  • Collaborative Team Environment

    Work alongside talented engineers who care about craft and building things that last. Participate in a culture that values human-centered work and meaningful impact.

  • High-Impact Role

    Lead foundational platform decisions that will compound for years across Notion's entire backend engineering organization.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    Initial Screening Call

    30-minute conversation with recruiter to discuss background, career trajectory, and alignment with Notion's values and the Staff Engineer role.

  2. 02

    Technical Screening Interview

    Deep-dive discussion with engineering team about your platform engineering experience, production Go expertise, and approach to architectural trade-offs. Be prepared to discuss specific examples of platforms you've built and how teams adopted them.

  3. 03

    System Design Interview

    Collaborative discussion on designing a production-scale Go platform including deployment strategies, observability, reliability patterns, and scaling considerations at Notion's scale.

  4. 04

    Platform & Strategy Discussion

    Conversation with Developer Experience leadership about your vision for the Go platform, approach to developer experience optimization, and how you'd prioritize the 90-day roadmap.

  5. 05

    Cross-Functional Collaboration

    Meetings with backend engineers and infrastructure team members to assess collaboration style, communication clarity, and ability to gather input without creating committee-driven design.

  6. 06

    Leadership & Values Alignment

    Final conversation with hiring manager and potentially senior leadership to assess fit with Notion culture, pragmatic decision-making philosophy, and commitment to making developers' lives better.

Full posting

Original listing.

Who We Are

Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together. 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

We’re rolling out Go support at production scale at Notion, and we need an owner who can make it durable. You’ll lead the work to turn Go into a fully supported, well-operated platform: reliable and scalable service patterns, paved paths for our tooling stack, and the guardrails that make building in Go feel fast and safe.

This role matters because our next wave of AI and agent-driven products will require backend services where Node won’t always be the right fit, and the platform decisions we make now will compound for years. While Go is the core focus, this role sits within Developer Experience and will regularly tackle other high-leverage engineering productivity challenges, developer experience ranging from AI-assisted development workflows and remote agent environments to CI performance, deployments, and reliability tooling.

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

  • Build out Notion’s next fully supported language (alongside TypeScript), with a clear operating model teams trust.

  • Own the success of Go as a platform at Notion, while helping the Developer Experience team tackle whatever engineering productivity bottlenecks matter most. Go is the primary focus today, but there is opportunity to shape areas such as AI-assisted development, remote agent environments, CI performance, deployments, and developer workflows.

  • Establish safe, reliable frameworks and patterns for running Go services at scale (deployment, observability, reliability, and generally “how we do production”).

  • Enable service architecture, maintenance, and ownership through easy, AI-enabled tooling that reduces toil and raises quality.

  • By your 90th day, you’ll have shipped a concrete “Go platform v1” that unblocks at least two production teams operating services at real world scale.

Skills You'll Need to Bring

  • Over 10 years of hands-on software development experience, thriving in fast-paced and dynamic environments.

  • Deep Go expertise, including experience operating production Go services at scale.

  • Track record of defining, driving, and owning a platform that other teams adopt: libraries, golden paths, migration playbooks, and guardrails that make systems easier to run.

  • Strong systems judgment: you can make trade-offs explicit (speed vs safety, abstraction vs flexibility) and bring teams along without turning it into a committee.

  • Curiosity and breadth to jump onto the highest-leverage developer experience problems as needed.

  • A drive to make developers’ lives better: you have a strong interest in keeping engineers in their flow state, and especially in thinking outside of the box to find ways to pave a better golden path for engineers to follow.

  • Pragmatic and business-oriented: You care about business impact, not just going after cool stuff, and prioritize projects accordingly. You may be opinionated, but you're not ideological and can learn new technologies as you go.

  • You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re curious and willing to adopt AI tools to work smarter and deliver better results.

Nice to Haves

  • Experience using AI-enabled developer tooling to increase leverage (scaffolding, maintenance workflows, reliability checks, and reducing repetitive work through better automation).

  • Experience operating production-scale Kubernetes clusters.

  • Familiarity with TypeScript, especially in ways to keep it running smoothly in a large codebase.

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 or New York City, the estimated base salary range for this role is $299,000–$352,000 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 and NYLL 144.

#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.

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