Notion Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Describe a feature you simplified or cut entirely after talking with users. What was the original scope and what convinced you to scale it back?

2.Tell me about a time you advocated for removing complexity from a user-facing feature. What was making it complex and how did you simplify it?

3.Tell me about a time user feedback completely changed how you approached a feature or project. What did you originally plan, what did users say, and how did you pivot?

4.Describe a time when users were struggling with something you built and their feedback made you completely rethink your approach. What was the original problem and how did you solve it differently?

5.Tell me about a time you had to deliver something in half the original timeline without compromising quality. How did you approach it and what tradeoffs did you make?

6.Walk me through the biggest 'no' you've said to a stakeholder request in the past year. What did they want, why did you push back, and how did it play out?

7.You need to implement a feature that lets users filter a database view by multiple columns in real-time. How would you handle the filtering logic on the frontend while keeping the UI responsive?

8.You notice that our TypeScript build times have increased from 30 seconds to 2 minutes over the past few months. How would you go about identifying and fixing the bottlenecks?

9.A user reports that their Notion page is loading slowly, and you suspect it's related to how we're handling nested block structures. Walk me through how you'd investigate and potentially optimize this.

10.A PM wants to add AI-powered auto-suggestions for database properties, but you're concerned about the performance impact on page load times. How would you design this feature to balance AI capabilities with user experience?

11.You're tasked with building a feature that lets users @mention people in any text block, similar to how comments work. How would you architect this to work reliably across Notion's real-time collaborative environment?

12.You're implementing a new block type that needs to sync data with an external API, but the API is unreliable and sometimes takes 10+ seconds to respond. How would you handle this in Notion's collaborative environment?

13.Design a full-text search system that can handle searching across millions of blocks in Notion workspaces. Users expect results in under 200ms, and the search needs to work across different block types like text, databases, and embedded content.

14.You're building a workspace activity feed that shows all changes across pages, databases, and comments for a 10,000-person organization. How would you design this system to handle the volume while keeping individual feeds personalized and performant?

15.Design the conflict resolution system for Notion's real-time collaborative editing when multiple people are simultaneously editing the same database row properties. How do you ensure data consistency while maintaining a smooth user experience?

16.Walk me through how you'd architect offline support for Notion mobile apps. Users need to view and edit their most important pages without internet, then sync seamlessly when they reconnect.

17.Design a system to handle Notion AI requests across the entire platform - from writing assistance to database queries to document summarization. You need to manage costs, latency, and reliability while supporting millions of daily AI interactions.

18.Design the backend architecture for Notion's permission system that needs to handle complex inheritance across pages, databases, and blocks while supporting real-time collaboration and sub-millisecond access checks.

19.Tell me about a time you had to convince another engineer to change their approach to something they felt strongly about. How did you handle the conversation?

20.Describe a situation where you had to coordinate work across multiple teams to deliver something important. What made it challenging and how did you manage it?

21.Describe a time you took ownership of something that wasn't explicitly your responsibility. What made you step up and how did you ensure it got done?

22.Tell me about a time you helped a colleague level up their technical skills. What was their challenge and how did you approach mentoring them?

23.Describe a time you had to influence a product or design decision as an engineer. How did you make your case and what was the outcome?

24.Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision that had already been made by senior engineers or leadership. How did you handle it?

25.Estimate how many database queries Notion's backend handles per second during peak hours. Walk me through your assumptions and calculation.

26.If page load times increased by 200ms across all of Notion, how would you estimate the impact on user engagement and revenue? What metrics would you track?

27.A startup using Notion for their company wiki reports that their pages load slowly when they have more than 100 team members. What factors could cause this and how would you investigate?

28.If we wanted to estimate the storage cost impact of adding AI-generated summaries to every Notion page, how would you calculate that? What data would you need?

29.Notion's mobile app usage has grown 3x faster than desktop usage this quarter. How would you determine if our current infrastructure can handle mobile-specific load patterns?

30.A Fortune 500 customer wants to migrate 50,000 employees from SharePoint to Notion. Estimate the data transfer volume and time required, including your key assumptions.