Meet (again) Max Schoening, Notion's new CTO
Oleh Ivan Zhao
Notion’s ethos has always been technology meets the liberal arts. To build the best tools for thought, we refuse to treat engineering and design as separate jobs. This shapes what we build and who we hire.
And almost no one represents that ethos better than Max Schoening.
When Max joined Notion last year, he described himself as a Tüftler, someone who tinkers until something works. This year, he and the team shipped two of our biggest launches: Custom Agents for everyday knowledge workers and our Developer Platform, which lets people and agents extend Notion to fit how they work.
And now, Max is stepping into the role of CTO. While Max has been our product and design leader for the last year, he’s an engineer by trade and has built as much as he has designed. He ran design early on at Heroku (the original PaaS) and worked on Cloud Run at Google. At GitHub, he spent six and a half years working on GitHub Issues, Pull Requests, GitHub Actions, and cloud development environments—tools that millions of developers use to build and ship software.
Max has spent his career making complex infrastructure feel simple, mostly for developers. At Notion, he’s doing the same for founders, builders, and businesses of all kinds.
He believes in open platforms that put customers first. So do we. Openness and agent-neutral context benefit all of our customers, from a small coffee business wrestling with its wholesale inventory to our largest global enterprises trying to balance innovation, token costs, and governance at scale.
Max is also a two-time founder. Founders are naturally multidisciplinary, in service of their customers and ideas. Notion has increasingly become a home for former (and future!) founders, and Max has already helped bring many of them here.
The org chart of the future will have fewer boundaries between disciplines, and we’re hiring people whose work and taste cut across traditional lines. We’re lucky to have Max leading our technical organization into this future, with a deep bench of leaders alongside him. There’s a lot left at Notion to tinker with, and I’m glad that I get to keep building with Max and our whole team.