Notion · 2 months ago
Engineering Manager, Search Quality & Ranking
San Francisco, California
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level
$247K/yr - $290K/yr
2+ years expNotion is a company that provides a unified workspace for teams, integrating various tools and AI capabilities. The Engineering Manager for Search Quality & Ranking will lead a team of engineers to enhance the search experience for millions of users, focusing on search ranking algorithms and AI-powered search features.
AppsCollaborationProduct ManagementReal TimeSoftware
Responsibilities
You'll build and manage a diverse and inclusive team of 5-7 engineers working on search ranking, query understanding, and search UX
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
Qualification
Required
You have 2+ years of 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
You understand that search is mission-critical infrastructure—you're excited about the work even when it involves unglamorous bug fixes and reliability improvements
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 create team environments that are at once collaborative, empowering, supportive, and challenging
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're passionate about line management responsibilities and building a strong, cohesive team culture
Preferred
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
Benefits
Highly competitive cash compensation
Equity
Benefits
Company
Notion
Notion is a workspace platform that offers note-taking, collaboration, task management, wikis, and databases.
501-1000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Notion has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (31)
2024 (23)
2023 (9)
2022 (22)
2021 (7)
2020 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$343.2MKey Investors
Index VenturesFirst Round Capital
2025-12-15Secondary Market
2021-10-08Series C· $275M
2020-04-02Series B· $50M
Leadership Team
Akshay Kothari
COO
Ha Nguyen
Global Head of Demand Generation
Recent News
TechRadar.com
2026-01-04
Company data provided by crunchbase