This cover letter is also available at:

https://www.xiangyi.li/notion-cover-letters/software-engineer-product-infrastructure

My resume:

https://www.xiangyi.li/resumes/notion-software-engineer-product-infrastructure/Xiangyi_Li.pdf

Hi Notion team,

I wasn’t looking for jobs until I saw the job postings at Notion earlier today. It's a product I used daily and am particularly interested. I started using Notion as early as before notion template sharing was a thing because I've kept a keen interest in note taking software for a long time and was using Evernote before. Ivan Zhao's story (moving to Kyoto) and pitch (inventing paper for the internet) are also big inspirations for me. Right now I'm working at Tesla as a software engineer, but the opportunity of working at Notion makes me very excited and mean a lot more to me.

I think I can help the Notion team for the following reasons:

• Full-Stack Development Expertise: With experience at Tesla and Dolby, I have developed strong skills in full-stack development, contributing at a high level and building world-class software.
• AI and Machine Learning Proficiency: My hands-on experience with AI includes building applications that leverage AI, which aligns with Notion’s roadmap to integrate AI. I have also taken courses in machine learning and have experiences in training, fine-tuning, and serving CV and NLP models for specific tasks like object detection.
• Startup Experience: As the founding engineer at Kimi.ai, I have learned in practice how to ship products fast and good. My attention to product detail and willingness to contribute across various areas of work will be beneficial to Notion’s dynamic environment.
• Passion for Notion’s Product: I user Notion daily. I recommend it to people whenever I have the chance: whether it's school projects or my last startup experiences. I know the features, the progress of the features (for example the improvements you made to the search functionality), and the community (for example Theo.gg's An Open Letter to Notion).

For the Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure role, my experience aligns well with features like offline mode and permission model migration. For offline mode I might want to use something like IndexedDB for local storage. I might consider using a WebRTC to sync data, and use a Service Worker to detect connections on the background. I have also built collaborative editing features for a product at Red Hat and a personal side project collaborated with an ex-Google engineer. He taught me how to use Y.js and related algorithms like CRDT and OT. As for the migration to a permission model, I would say I have implemented very granular RBAC for the Dolby Vision Support portal, and would test thoroughly for a migration. I haven’t dealt with large migration in production to be honest, but things I would do by rolling it phase-by-phase, testing and monitoring regularly, and making really good backups.

Also, as someone who pays close attention to Notion’s and Ivan’s news, I definitely have heard about Ada, Engelbart, and Alan Key, and the inspirations they give the Notion product.

Thank you for the time reading this letter. I seldom use the word dream job, but I really can’t figure out something more ideal to me at this point than working at Notion. Would love to hear back from you and let’s keep in touch.

Best,

Xiangyi