Engineering Manager, Search & Context Platform

📋 Description

• • Lead a high-performing engineering team responsible for search infrastructure including lexical and semantic retrieval, indexing systems (streaming and batch data pipelines), and context/memory primitives that power Notion’s AI agents.
• • Set the technical roadmap balancing foundational platform investments—latency, cost, reliability, scalability, freshness, completeness, security, and enterprise readiness—with rapid iteration on indexing new entities and building new context capabilities for agents.
• • Operate the platform with a high reliability bar, enforcing SLOs, deep observability, on-call health, early-warning signals, and prevention-first incident and post-mortem practices to improve search and context quality, performance, and reliability for Notion’s largest customers.
• • Partner closely with the Search & Context product team and the AI team as primary internal customers, defining interfaces, capabilities, and commitments that accelerate product velocity while maintaining platform sustainability.
• • Anticipate evolving product needs by proactively investing in platform capacity, capabilities, and primitives to ensure the infrastructure enables, rather than constrains, innovation in AI and agent-based workflows.
• • Build, coach, and grow the engineering team through hiring, feedback, career development, and fostering an environment where senior individual contributors thrive and deliver their best work.
• • Contribute to Notion’s broader engineering practices around platform design, reliability, on-call culture, and AI-era infrastructure standards.
• • Make hard tradeoffs between product velocity and long-term platform health, communicating clear constraints or alternative paths when balancing competing demands from internal stakeholders.
• • Maintain deep technical involvement: stay close to code and architecture, credibly debate design decisions with senior engineers, and raise the technical bar of the team through hands-on guidance.
• • Ensure the platform supports enterprise-grade requirements including scalability to handle 100M+ users, secure data handling, and readiness for multi-tenant, permissioned environments.
• • Stay ahead of rapid changes in AI technology, retrieval methods, and LLM-based systems, adapting platform strategy to evolving product surfaces and underlying technologies.
• • Drive measurable improvements in search relevance, retrieval speed, system uptime, and data freshness across all consumer teams relying on the Search & Context Platform.
• • Own end-to-end responsibility for the platform’s performance, security, and scalability as it scales to support exponential growth in indexed content and agent-driven query load.
• • Translate between product and engineering languages to align internal teams on technical priorities, constraints, and opportunities for innovation.
• • Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions for infrastructure components, ensuring platform solutions are cost-effective, maintainable, and aligned with Notion’s long-term technical vision.
• • Champion a culture of ownership, reliability, and technical excellence across the team, embedding best practices in system design, incident response, and observability.
• • Collaborate across engineering disciplines to integrate search and context capabilities into broader AI agent systems and product workflows.
• • Ensure the platform meets enterprise readiness standards including auditability, ACL-aware indexing, and secure data retrieval for large organizations using Notion.