Engineering Manager, Search & Context Platform

San Francisco, CA (On-site)

$280K/yr – $330K/yrSenior Level4+ years expFull time

Posted 4 days ago

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Job Summary

Own the Notion search and context platform, leading a team to deliver reliable, scalable indexing, retrieval, and memory primitives while partnering with product and AI teams to accelerate product velocity.

  • Own the end-to-end platform for search, indexing, retrieval, and context.
  • Drive a roadmap balancing foundational investments with rapid feature iteration.
  • Ensure high reliability with SLOs, observability, and incident practices.

Job Description

Responsibilities

  • Lead a high-performing platform team responsible for search infrastructure (lexical & semantic), indexing (including streaming & batch data pipelines), retrieval (lexical + semantic + hybrid), and the context/memory primitives that power Notion's agents.
  • Set a clear roadmap that balances foundational platform investments (latency, cost, reliability, scalability, freshness, completeness, security, enterprise readiness) with fast iteration on indexing new entities/features and building new context capabilities for agents.
  • Operate the platform with a high reliability bar: SLOs, deep observability, on-call health, early-warning signals, and prevention-first incident/post-mortem practices and drive measurable improvements to search and context quality, performance, and reliability for Notion's largest customers and o
  • Partner and build closely with the Search & Context product team, the AI team, and other consumers of the platform on the right interfaces, capabilities, and commitments.
  • Staying ahead of the needs of your customer teams by anticipating where the product is going, investing in capacity, capabilities, and primitives and making sure the platform accelerates product velocity.
  • Build and lead the team through hiring, coaching, feedback, growth, and creating an environment where strong technical ICs do their best work.
  • Contribute to Notion's broader engineering practices around platform design, reliability, on-call, and AI-era infrastructure.

Requirements

  • 4+ years of experience leading engineering teams with a track record of shipping high-quality systems in a fast-paced environment.
  • A technically leaning management style—you stay close to the code and the design, can credibly debate architecture and tradeoffs with senior ICs, and raise the technical bar of your team.
  • Sufficient depth in search, retrieval, or large-scale data/indexing systems: lexical search (e.g. BM25), semantic search (embeddings, ANN/vector indexes), big data pipelines, hybrid retrieval, ranking, and the surrounding infrastructure.
  • Experience product managing a platform or infrastructure scope: continuous evaluation technical architecture, SLAs, and a roadmap on behalf of internal customer teams, and making prioritization calls when those customers want different things.
  • Strong systems judgment around scalability, performance, security, build vs buy and enterprise readiness—you've shipped systems that had to be fast, cheap, secure, and reliable at scale, not just functional.
  • A bias for making hard tradeoffs to unblock product velocity while protecting the long-term health of the platform; comfortable saying "yes, with these constraints" or "no, here’s the better path."
  • Experience working closely with product and AI teams as customers of a platform—you can speak both languages and translate between them.
  • High tolerance for ambiguity and rapid change; you enjoy operating in a space where both the product surface (agents, AI) and the underlying technology (retrieval, LLMs) are evolving quickly.

Preferred

  • Experience building agentic or tool-using systems, or platforms that serve LLM-based products.
  • Familiarity with permissioned, multi-tenant enterprise data—ACL-aware indexing, retrieval, and audit.
  • Understanding of classic information retrieval metrics, ranking, or applied ML.
  • Has led teams through rapid scope and priority changes and evolving org boundaries.

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