Engineering Manager, AI Search

ABOUT US: Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organizations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money. In-person collaboration is essential to Notion's culture. We require all team members to work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, our designated Anchor Days. Certain teams or positions may require additional in-office workdays. ABOUT THE ROLE: As the Engineering Manager for our Search Quality & Ranking team, you'll lead a team of engineers to build and improve the search experience that millions of Notion users rely on every day. As Notion scales—supporting over 100 million customers—search becomes even more critical. Search at Notion is critical infrastructure that powers not just the navigational user experience, but also serves as the foundation and memory for our AI capabilities. You'll guide the team's work on search ranking algorithms, query understanding, AI-powered connector search, and experimentation that help us continuously improve search quality at scale. As we move scale to larger enterprises, the ability to effectively search across sprawling workspaces with hundreds or thousands of pages becomes crucial to making Notion's collaboration experience scale. This is a role for someone who is passionate about the craft of building great search experiences and understands that reliability and functional accuracy are just as important as cutting-edge features. WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE: - You'll build and manage a diverse and inclusive team of engineers working on search ranking, query understanding, and search UX. You'll create a healthy environment in your team that embodies Notion's values. - You'll recruit, coach, and develop engineers; you'll ensure engineers are regularly receiving feedback and are making progress on personal and professional goals. You don't shy away from performance conversations and recognize the relationship between objective feedback and career growth. - You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional peers to set the direction of your team, responding to user feedback to improve search quality and relevance across Notion's core product and AI connectors. - You'll facilitate planning—the prioritization, sequencing, and staffing of work—for your team, balancing immediate reliability needs with longer-term search quality improvements. - You'll keep the team accountable and ensure the team is consistently working on the most important things that deliver value to Notion users, whether that's meeting the growing complexity of user questions or building new ranking capabilities that help users find exactly what they need. - You'll be responsible for maintaining a high-quality bar for everything your team builds, with particular attention to search reliability, latency, and relevance metrics. - You'll be accountable for driving project execution, using data to make decisions about prioritization and impact. You have a real passion for experimentation and will help the team build the infrastructure and practices needed to measure and improve search quality systematically. - You'll work with the rest of the Engineering team to shape how Notion's engineering organization works—you'll help develop our technical practices, recruiting and onboarding strategy, planning and prioritization process, and more. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING: - You have experience managing engineering teams working on search, ranking, relevance, or related areas. You have a deep understanding of what it takes to build and maintain high-quality search experiences at scale—handling workspaces with millions of pages, thousands of users, and sub-3-second query times. - You have a sufficiently deep background in search quality, ranking algorithms, and experimentation methodologies to ask the right questions and think through tradeoffs, guiding team members to do their best work along the way. - You understand that search is mission-critical infrastructure—you're excited about the work even when it involves unglamorous bug fixes and reliability improvements, not just cutting-edge ML features. - You're excited about the evolving landscape of AI-powered search, including working with modern embedding models, hybrid lexical-semantic search architectures, integrating LLMs into search experiences, building connector search for third-party data sources, and exploring multimodal search capabilities. You understand that search isn't just a standalone feature—it's the memory and context engine that makes Notion AI uniquely capable of delivering workspace-aware answers. - You create team environments that are at once collaborative, empowering, supportive, and challenging—ones where engineers do their best work. - You value empathetic and direct communication enabling you to give and receive feedback effectively and create alignment cross-functionally or cross-teams. - You have a high tolerance for ambiguity and change. You enjoy jumping into whatever areas need attention and learning as you go. - You're passionate about line management responsibilities and building a strong, cohesive team culture. - 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 BONUS POINTS: - You have experience with AI connectors, enterprise search, or building search experiences across multiple data sources. - You have experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based features or integrating LLM-powered capabilities into search systems. - You've built or managed teams responsible for experimentation and A/B testing frameworks for search. - You have managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change. - You have experience rolling out engineering and management practices and processes—e.g., code review, performance reviews, and levels and ladders—where they didn't exist before. - You've heard of computing pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and others—and understand why we're big fans of their work. Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Notion. 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 made due to a disability, please let your recruiter know. 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 and New York, the estimated base salary range for this role is $280,000 - $330,000 per year. 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