10 Notion Software Engineer (New Grad) Interview Questions (2026)

Outline

Notion looks for product-taste matches. Have used the product. Pick a specific feature (databases, page templates, real-time collaboration, AI blocks) and articulate why it works or what you would change. Avoid generic praise. Show you have thought about the tradeoffs (flexibility vs guidance, performance vs richness).

Outline

STAR. Pick a project where you sweated UX details — empty states, error messages, loading transitions, keyboard shortcuts, accessibility. Concrete examples (the actual copy you wrote, the loading state you designed). Notion screens for craft — the interviewer wants to see you notice the things most engineers ignore.

Outline

STAR. Notion's product thesis is simplification — the all-in-one workspace is itself a simplification claim. Stories where you removed config knobs, collapsed two flows into one, or replaced a complex feature with a better default land well. Quantify the simplification (lines removed, steps cut, params eliminated).

Outline

Pick the project you know best. Cover problem, why this technology, key decisions (and the alternatives you rejected), what went wrong, what you would do differently with hindsight. Be ready to draw a diagram if asked. Notion interviewers go deep — knowing three layers down on at least one project matters.

Outline

Dynamic programming. dp[i][j] = LCS length of first i chars of A and first j chars of B. If A[i-1] == B[j-1]: dp[i][j] = dp[i-1][j-1] + 1, else max(dp[i-1][j], dp[i][j-1]). O(n*m) time, O(n*m) space (optimizable to O(min(n,m))). Walk through the recurrence with a small example.

Outline

DFS pre-order traversal. Recursive or iterative with an explicit stack. O(n) time, O(h) space for recursion. Walk through with a small tree. Follow-up: support pagination (return next N blocks given a cursor), or skip a subtree by ID. Notion asks this because their document model IS nested blocks.

Outline

Closure over a timeout handle. Return a function that clears the existing timeout and sets a new one. Handle this-binding and arguments. Discuss leading-edge vs trailing-edge variants. Mention performance: debounce vs throttle and when to use each. Notion frontend roles will likely ask this for live.

Outline

Walk edits in order, applying each. Each edit has position + content + type (insert/delete). Maintain document as a string or rope. Discuss what happens if positions become invalid after a prior edit (they shouldn't if edits are linear). Mention CRDTs or operational transforms only if the interviewer asks about concurrent edits.

Outline

Live coding. Start with state shape (array of objects with id, text, done). Then add the three handlers. Then UI rendering. Handle accessibility (button vs div), keyboard (Enter to add, Esc to cancel). Code quality matters more than features — names, structure, no dead code. Add one polish (focus the input after add).

Outline

Tokenizer + recursive descent parser. Tokens: text, asterisk, underscore, backtick. Parser walks tokens, builds a tree of nodes (text, bold, italic, code). Discuss nested markup (bold inside italic). Edge cases: unclosed delimiters (treat as literal), escaped characters. Notion-y because parsing structured text is the bread and butter.