Startup Program Manager Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Who We Are
Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together. 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 Us:
Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life's work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email-with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organizations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.
In-person collaboration is essential to Notion's culture. We require all team members to work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, our designated Anchor Days. Certain teams or positions may require additional in-office workdays.
About the Role:
The Startup Program & Experience Lead owns the startup customer journey during the onboarding and trial experience, helping startups successfully adopt Notion, engage with the platform, and realize value early in their journey.
Working closely with the Head of Startups, this role combines program management, customer experience, lifecycle engagement and operational execution to improve startup activation, engagement, conversion and retention across the region.
This person partners cross-functionally with Marketing, Product, Customer Success and Partnerships teams to create scalable startup programs, onboarding experiences and engagement initiatives that support long-term business growth.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building systems and experiences at scale, while remaining deeply connected to customer needs and operational excellence.
What You'll Achieve:

• Improve startup activation, engagement, conversion and retention across the regional startup funnel.
• Build and manage scalable onboarding and lifecycle programs for startup customers.
• Create startup-focused educational, onboarding and engagement experiences that help customers realize value quickly.
• Identify friction points and improve the startup customer journey.
• Support the execution of startup initiatives, campaigns, events and ecosystem programs across the region.
• Track and analyze program performance, customer engagement and operational metrics to improve conversion and ARR over time.
• Help to build the Startups 2.0 operational frameworks, creating an automated scorecard to identify top startups and provide a high-touch customer experience.

Skills You'll Need to Bring:

• Experience in program management, customer experience, customer success, growth, operations or startup-focused roles.
• Strong organizational and project management skills.
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives and priorities in fast-moving environments.
• Strong customer empathy and operational mindset.
• Comfortable working cross-functionally across Product, Marketing, Partnerships and Customer Success teams.
• Data-oriented mindset with ability to identify patterns, friction points and improvement opportunities.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• You don't need to be an AI expert, but you're curious and willing to adopt AI tools to work smarter and deliver better results.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience working with startups or startup ecosystems.
• Experience with onboarding, lifecycle or customer engagement programs.
• Familiarity with product-led growth environments.
• Experience building scalable operational processes or customer programs.
• Passion for AI, productivity tools and the future of work.

We hire talented and passionate people from a variety of backgrounds because we want our global employee base to represent the wide diversity of our customers. If you're excited about a role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every bullet point listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply. If you're a builder at heart, share our company values, and enthusiastic about making software toolmaking ubiquitous, we want to hear from you.
Notion is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Notion considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Notion is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.
Notion is committed to providing highly competitive cash compensation, equity, and benefits. The compensation offered for this role will be based on multiple factors such as location, the role's scope and complexity, and the candidate's experience and expertise, and may vary from the range provided below. For roles based in San Francisco or New York City, the estimated base salary range for this role is $174,000 - $205,000 per year.
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A Note on AI
You don't need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect every Notino to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement - when that's the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don't treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.
Equal Opportunity & Accommodations
We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply. Notion is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. Consistent with applicable law, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Notion provides reasonable accommodations during the application process; if you need one, please let your recruiter know.
Notion is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Notion considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Notion is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.