Forward Deployed Engineer - India

Job description

WHO WE ARE Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpYpWfEK5s. We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. ABOUT THE ROLE: Notion is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer focused on migrations to join our growing team in India. You will help deliver complex, production-grade data migrations, integrations, and automations for customers across APAC. This is initially an internally focused, hands-on engineering role. You will partner closely with regional Forward Deployed Engineers, who own customer discovery, solution architecture, stakeholder communication, risk management, and final customer validation. You will own the behind-the-scenes technical execution layer from feasibility assessment and implementation through testing, production rollout, QA, reconciliation, reporting, and operational handoff. You will work across multiple customer environments and source systems, often with incomplete requirements, imperfect data, and real-world constraints. Success requires strong engineering fundamentals, sound judgment, careful validation, and the ability to turn one-off delivery work into reusable tools and repeatable playbooks. As a founding engineer in India, you will help build a new regional engineering capability from the ground up. You will create migration infrastructure, standards, and reusable tooling used by FDEs across APAC, while establishing practices that can scale globally. The role offers an opportunity to become a technical authority for production migration delivery, shaping how Notion approaches reliability, validation, and operational quality across complex customer environments. As the team grows, the role may also expand toward customer-facing FDE work, technical leadership, or a deeper engineering path, depending on business needs and demonstrated capability. WHAT YOU'LL ACHIEVE: • Own the technical execution layer after customer requirements, scope, and solution architecture have been established with the regional FDE. Contribute to feasibility assessment, estimation, implementation planning, and risk identification while the regional FDE remains accountable for customer discovery, scope, architecture, stakeholder communication, and final acceptance. • Apply a repeatable migration lifecycle covering source inventory and sampling, scope and pruning decisions, compatibility and degradation assessment, transformation design, pilot or dry run, user acceptance testing, production cutover, reconciliation, remediation, hypercare, and documented handoff. • Translate approved customer and regional FDE requirements into clear technical designs, implementation plans, test strategies, runbooks, and delivery estimates. • Build production-quality migration utilities, backend services, data pipelines, integrations, and automations using Python, SQL, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure. • Investigate source-system behavior, data quality issues, permissions, rate limits, authentication constraints, and edge cases, then recommend practical solutions. • Design and validate permissions, ownership, and inheritance mappings against the approved migration plan. Make unsupported or ambiguous access requirements explicit, obtain the required decision or approval, and preserve evidence of validation. • Design migrations for reliability, scale, security, observability, idempotency, failure recovery, and safe reruns. • Execute migrations only through approved environments, devices, accounts, and tooling. Follow least-privilege access, customer-specific security and data-residency requirements, and approved handling procedures. Do not store customer data in unmanaged local or external systems, and escalate privacy, security, or sovereignty concerns before execution. • Build validation and reconciliation frameworks that provide clear evidence of migration completeness, accuracy, and exceptions. • Debug failures across application code, infrastructure, customer data, third-party systems, and the Notion platform, then drive issues through resolution. • Manage multiple implementation workstreams, dependencies, and priorities while communicating scope, progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly. • Surface scope changes, unsupported requirements, timeline risks, and material effort increases early. Document assumptions and trade-offs, and escalate with options and a recommended path rather than silently absorbing additional work. • Maintain an auditable record of scope, decisions, risks, approvals, validation evidence, and customer acceptance criteria in the agreed shared workspace or channel. • Convert repeated delivery patterns into reusable components, automation, documentation, and playbooks that improve speed, quality, and cost over time. • Bring field learnings back to Notion's Product and Engineering teams as actionable platform feedback and technical requirements. SKILLS YOU'LL NEED TO BRING: • 3 to 6 years of hands-on experience in backend engineering, data engineering, integration engineering, implementation engineering, technical consulting, solutions engineering, or a similar technical role. • Strong hands-on Python development experience. • Working experience