Engineering Manager, Context (Agentic Search) at Notion

This role is built for a seasoned engineering leader with deep expertise in search architecture, ranking algorithms, and information retrieval. You are likely a

Work type: onsite

Location: San Francisco, California

Salary: $280,000 – $330,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This role is built for a seasoned engineering leader with deep expertise in search architecture, ranking algorithms, and information retrieval. You are likely a Senior Engineering Manager who has managed teams in high-scale environments where sub-second latency and search relevance are mission-critical. While the role involves cutting-edge AI and RAG-based features, the ideal candidate prizes "un-glamorous" reliability and infra stability just as much as new ML capabilities. The compensation is highly competitive, offering a base salary between **$280k and $330k**, plus equity. Although the listing mentions "fully remote," the description clarifies a strictly **hybrid culture** requiring three "Anchor Days" (Mon, Tue, Thu) in the San Francisco office. This is a high-impact opportunity to influence the "memory" of a tool used by 100 million people, positioning you at the intersection of enterprise search and modern LLM application. **You might be a good fit if you:** * Have managed engineering teams specifically focused on search, query understanding, or ranking. * Are comfortable leading through ambiguity in a fast-growing startup environment. * Possess a strong technical background in Python, hybrid lexical-semantic search, and experimentation (A/B testing). * Live in (or are willing to relocate to) San Francisco to meet the three-day in-office requirement.

Job Description

# 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:

We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to lead Context: the team responsible for the systems and product primitives that give notion’s users and notion agents access to all the relevant context for the task at hand. This includes classic search ranking algorithms and surfaces, but also agentic trajectories with carefully crafted tool calls.

You’ll lead a team that focuses on two types of work: reliability of the current context systems and unlocking new contextual capabilities.

• We must have a production-grade search product (stability, extensibility, latency, cost). We must ensure search—still a core navigational endpoint—can reliably serve our 100M+ customers.

• At the same time, the “agent layer” (how agents interact with search) now accounts for the majority of AI-enabled search traffic (50%+), and is where we expect the fastest iteration and biggest user-facing gains.

• Build and lead a high-performing team responsible for context, memories, and ranking that power agent workflows across Notion.

• Drive a roadmap that improves the end-to-end reliability of agents acquiring context across Notion + connectors.

• Raise the bar on context quality through evaluation + experimentation, and ship improvements that move core user metrics.

• Balance foundational platform work (latency, cost, stability) with rapid iteration on new agentic capabilities.

• Partner deeply across AI, product, infra, and partner ecosystems to unblock delivery and set clear ownership boundaries.

• Direction and execution for Context as both a product and a platform.

• Agentic retrieval approaches that treat “finding” as a sequence of actions (tool use, query generation, iterative retrieval), not a single ranked list.

• A durable measurement loop: evaluation frameworks, instrumentation, and experimentation practices to improve functional correctness and user-perceived usefulness.

• Team health and talent: hiring, coaching, feedback, growth, and performance management.

• Experience leading engineering teams working on search/retrieval/relevance, AI product, or adjacent platform problems.

• Experience building agentic or tool-using systems

• Strong product + systems judgment in ambiguous environments; can make crisp tradeoffs and keep execution moving.

• Comfort owning a roadmap that requires heavy cross-team coordination and stakeholder alignment.

• Sufficient technical depth in modern retrieval (lexical + semantic, embeddings, reranking) and where LLMs fit (query generation, tool orchestration, evidence selection).

• Track record building collaborative, supportive, and high-expectation team cultures.

• High tolerance for ambiguity and change; enjoys learning quickly and adapting plans.

• Experience with multi-source retrieval and permissioned enterprise data.

• Experience establishing eval frameworks for AI/agent outcomes.

• Experience with classic information retrieval metrics and machine learning techniques.

• Has led teams through rapid scope changes and evolving org boundaries.

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.

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](https://notion.notion.site/Notion-Global-Recruiting-Privacy-Policy-fc3eb4e829354a26a2bb6fd5e289b550?pvs=74).

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