Notion

Software Engineer, Developer Experience (Go Lead)

Notion6 days ago
Location

New York, New York

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 299,000 – 352,000

Level

Staff

Role

Staff Engineer, Developer Experience

Posted

Jun 23, 2026

Full TimeStaff

The role

Summary

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.

What you'll do

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.

What we look for

Technical

Production Go ExpertiseDeep hands-on experience operating production-grade Go services at scale, including service architecture, deployment patterns, and operational considerations for large-scale systems.
Platform EngineeringDemonstrated 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 DevelopmentStrong 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 ArchitectureExpertise in designing reliable and scalable service patterns, including observability, reliability frameworks, and production-ready deployment strategies.
Developer Experience OptimizationProven ability to identify and solve high-leverage developer productivity bottlenecks through tooling, automation, and workflow optimization.

Education

Computer Science FundamentalsStrong 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 DevelopmentOver a decade of hands-on software development experience in fast-paced, dynamic environments with demonstrated growth through progressively complex technical challenges.
Platform OwnershipTrack record of owning and evolving internal developer platforms that other engineering teams successfully adopted and depended upon in production environments.
Production Operations at ScaleExperience operating and maintaining complex systems at production scale, with understanding of reliability requirements, incident response, and operational maturity.

Skills

Required skills

Go Programming LanguageExpert-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 EngineeringAbility 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 KnowledgeDeep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, partition tolerance, service communication patterns, and failure modes.
Production OperationsHands-on experience operating backend services in production including incident response, performance optimization, scaling strategies, and observability implementation.
Systems Thinking & Decision-MakingAbility 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 CommunicationExcellent ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders, building alignment around platform decisions.

Nice to have

TypeScript & Node.js EcosystemExperience 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 OrchestrationProduction experience operating and maintaining Kubernetes clusters at scale, including workload management, networking, and cluster lifecycle operations.
AI-Assisted Development ToolingHands-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 CodeExperience designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines, implementing infrastructure as code practices, and building automation that scales across hundreds of services.
Observability & MonitoringDeep experience building observability solutions including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics collection, and dashboard design that enables rapid incident diagnosis.
Open Source Platform DevelopmentExperience contributing to or maintaining open source infrastructure projects that require both engineering excellence and community management.

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 299,000 – 352,000 (annual)

Stock options

Available

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.

Interview process

  1. 1
    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. 2
    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. 3
    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. 4
    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. 5
    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. 6
    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.
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Notion

Notion

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Notion is an American productivity software providing an all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, and databases. Popular for its flexibility, it serves individuals and teams for project management and collaboration, evolving from a no-code tool to a versatile platform.

San Francisco, California, United StatesFounded 2013notion.so

Tech Stack

Languages
GoTypeScriptBash/Shell Scripting
Frameworks
gRPCProtocol BuffersStandard Go Libraries
Databases
PostgreSQLRedis
Tools
KubernetesDockerPrometheusGrafanaGitHub/Git
Other
Microservices ArchitectureObservability & LoggingInfrastructure as CodeAI-Enhanced Development

Interview Guides

11 guides available for Notion

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