Notion Staff Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Describe a feature you and your team built, then cut or significantly simplified after talking to actual users. What did you learn and how did you handle the team's reaction?

2.Describe a time you advocated for a simpler user experience even though it made the engineering more complex. What was the tradeoff and how did you sell it to your team?

3.Tell me about a specific time user feedback completely changed your technical approach on a project. What was your original plan, what did users tell you, and how did you adapt?

4.Give me an example of when user behavior data showed you that your team's assumptions were wrong. What did the data reveal and how did you change direction?

5.Walk me through a time you had to deliver a complex project in half the originally planned timeline. How did you compress the timeline without compromising quality?

6.Tell me about the most significant project, feature, or initiative you said no to in the last year. What was it, who wanted it, and how did you make that call?

7.You're investigating why some users report that their Notion pages take 5+ seconds to load, but others load instantly. What's your debugging strategy?

8.Notion's block storage engine needs to handle millions of block updates per day while maintaining data consistency. Describe how you'd architect the storage layer for optimal write performance.

9.You notice that Notion's full-text search is returning slow results for workspaces with millions of blocks. You have 30 minutes to investigate and present initial findings to the team. What's your approach?

10.Write a TypeScript function that takes a Notion database view configuration and returns the filtered and sorted rows. The view can have multiple filters with AND/OR logic and multiple sorts.

11.You're implementing a new block type in Notion's editor. This block needs to support real-time collaborative editing while maintaining consistent state across dozens of concurrent editors. Walk me through your approach.

12.You're tasked with implementing Notion AI's context retrieval system. Given a user query, you need to find the most relevant blocks across their entire workspace. How would you approach this?

13.Design a notification system for Notion that handles @mentions, page comments, and database changes. It needs to support 5 million daily active users with smart batching to avoid notification spam. How do you build this?

14.You're tasked with migrating Notion Calendar's 10 million calendar events from the legacy Cron infrastructure to Notion's block-based storage while maintaining zero downtime. Walk me through your migration strategy.

15.Design the database view engine for Notion Databases that can render the same data as a table, kanban, calendar, and gallery in real-time for 50 concurrent viewers. The database has 100k rows and gets 1000 updates per minute.

16.You're building Notion AI's workspace search that needs to understand context across 50 million blocks in real-time. When someone searches for 'quarterly goals,' it should find relevant content even if those exact words don't appear. How do you architect this?

17.Design a permissions system for Notion workspaces that needs to handle 10 million users across 500k teams, where a single page can have 50+ unique permission rules. How would you architect this to keep page loads under 200ms?

18.Notion needs to sync offline edits when users reconnect after being offline for hours. You're designing the conflict resolution system for when multiple people edited the same page offline. Walk me through your approach.

19.Tell me about a time you had to convince a senior engineering leader to change their technical approach. How did you build your case and what was the outcome?

20.Describe a time you had to mentor an engineer whose code quality wasn't meeting your team's standards. How did you approach the conversation and help them improve?

21.Tell me about a cross-team initiative you led where the other teams had competing priorities. How did you get everyone aligned and drive it to completion?

22.Describe a time you had to make a significant architectural decision with incomplete information and tight deadlines. How did you approach the decision and what did you learn?

23.Tell me about a time you inherited a complex system with significant technical debt and had to decide what to tackle first. How did you prioritize and get stakeholder buy-in?

24.Describe a situation where you disagreed with your team's approach on a high-stakes technical decision. How did you handle the disagreement and drive toward resolution?

25.Estimate how many blocks Notion creates per day across all workspaces globally. Walk me through your assumptions and reasoning.

26.Notion's mobile app usage dropped 8% last week with no code changes or incidents. You have one hour to present initial findings to leadership. What's your investigation approach?

27.You're evaluating whether to build Notion's own video calling feature or integrate with Zoom. Estimate the total cost of ownership for each option over 3 years, including all hidden costs.

28.Notion AI's response quality degraded 15% this month based on user ratings, but our model metrics show no regression. You need to identify the root cause. How do you approach this discrepancy?

29.Estimate the annual infrastructure cost impact if Notion increased real-time collaboration update frequency from 200ms to 50ms. Consider all downstream effects on our systems.

30.Notion is considering launching a marketplace where users can sell custom templates and automations. Estimate the revenue potential in year one and identify the biggest assumptions in your model.