Staff Core Platform Engineer - n8n

About n8n

n8n is the open workflow orchestration platform built for the new era of AI. We give technical teams the freedom of code with the speed of no-code, so they can automate faster, smarter, and without limits. Backed by a fiercely inventive community and 500+ builder-approved integrations, we’re changing the way people bring systems together and scale ideas for impact.

Since our founding in 2019, we’ve grown into a diverse team of over 260 - working across Europe and the US, connected by a shared builder spirit and with our centre of gravity in Berlin.

The Role

Your main goal will be to shape and evolve the core platform architecture that powers n8n — creating scalable, configurable foundations across execution, infrastructure, and frontend platform so 80+ product engineers and our open-source community can build confidently across cloud and self-hosted deployments.

Working across our platform teams, you’ll bring architectural coherence to the systems they jointly own and help us make the right long-term technical decisions as n8n scales.

Key Responsibilities

Architectural direction across Core Platform

• Drive architecture across the two Core Platform teams, ensuring execution, infrastructure, data, and frontend platform systems evolve as a coherent whole rather than independent components.
• Design highly adaptable backend foundations that support different workloads, deployment models, shared product team needs, and future scale without creating unnecessary complexity.
• Partner with the FE platform workstream on core canvas architecture, real-time communication, performance, plugin contracts, and other platform primitives used by product teams.

Execution, distributed systems & data foundations

• Evolve core subsystems including durable workflow execution and state, orchestration, queue and task distribution, worker management, scheduling, and horizontal scaling.
• Design for correctness and resilience across distributed environments, including failure modes, idempotency, state transitions, tenant isolation, and reliability guarantees.
• Shape our data and persistence architecture, including database scaling, sharding, migration strategies, deployment abstractions, and long-term operational maintainability.

Platform architecture & engineering enablement

• Lead consequential technical decisions through clear proposals and RFCs, making trade-offs explicit and aligning engineers and stakeholders around durable solutions.
• Define stable platform interfaces and abstractions that reduce coupling, support safe migrations, and make the platform easier for feature teams to build on.
• Mentor engineers across all engineering teams through design reviews, pairing, and technical guidance, raising the bar for architecture, system design, and maintainability.

Requirements

Must-haves

• Staff-level architectural ownership: Track record of leading architecture across multiple systems or teams, including migrations, re-architectures, or foundational platform initiatives with long-term organizational impact.
• Systems thinking: Deep reasoning about invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs, with comfort making decisions where there is no obviously perfect solution.
• Configurable systems at scale: Experience designing highly configurable, adaptable systems that serve multiple use cases or operating modes without becoming brittle or excessively complex.
• Distributed systems depth: Experience designing and operating distributed systems involving concepts such as asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, and resilience.
• Data architecture at scale: Experience with data-intensive systems where persistence, performance, isolation, migrations, and operational reliability were meaningful architectural concerns.
• TypeScript & Node.js depth: Strong TypeScript experience and a history of building substantial backend systems with Node.js beyond conventional CRUD applications.
• Cross-team technical leadership: Ability to influence through technical judgment, clear communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship, helping multiple teams converge on better solutions without relying on formal authority.
• Platform enablement mindset: Focus on creating clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences that allow other engineers to move faster and more safely.
• Long-horizon engineering: Energized by modularization, migrations, refactoring, and evolving existing systems while keeping the product and engineering organization moving.

Nice-to-haves

• Workflow, orchestration or devtools experience: Experience with workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-heavy SaaS products.
• Frontend platform architecture: Experience with architecture-heavy frontend systems such as canvas applications, plugin systems, real-time applications, web workers, or complex rendering environments.
• Durable execution patterns: Experience designing or operating systems using event sourcing, sagas, durable execution, or related state-management patterns.
• Multi-tenant architecture: Experience designing systems where tenant isolation, resource management, data boundaries, or noisy-neighbour concerns were important.
• Open-source experience: Contributions to or maintenance of open-source software and understanding of public contracts and backward compatibility.
• Large-scale SaaS exposure: Experience operating systems at meaningful scale or in environments where reliability and architectural decisions had broad customer impact.
• Monolith → modular migrations: Experience decomposing monolithic systems or leading incremental architectural migrations without preventing product teams from continuing to ship.
• Multi-deployment awareness: Experience designing products that need to work consistently across both managed cloud and self-hosted environments.
• Observability mindset: Focus on instrumentation, debugging, incident response, rollout safety, and operability as part of system design.
• Strong CS grounding: Deep knowledge of distributed systems concepts, consistency models, consensus, formal methods, or similarly rigorous approaches to system correctness.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation 💸 – Fair and attractive pay.
• Ownership 💪 – Equity options for all employees.
• Work/life balance 🏖️ – Generous time off to recharge:
  • Europe: 30 days of vacation, plus public holidays.
  • US: 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays.
• Health & wellness 🩺 – Local country health benefits in Europe; multiple low-premium medical, dental, and vision plans in the US.
• Future planning 💰 – Pension contributions in Europe; 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% employer match in the US.
• Financial security 🛡️ – Local country benefits in Europe; company-paid short-term/long-term disability and life insurance in the US.
• Career growth 📈 – €1K (or equivalent) per year learning budget for courses, books, events, or coaching.
• A passionate team 🤩 – Regular hackathons and collaborative culture.
• Remote-first 🌏 – Work remotely across Europe, with regular off-sites for team bonding.
• Giving back 🤝 – $100 per month to support open-source projects you care about.
• Visa Support ✈️ – Visa sponsorship is available for Germany; for other countries, you must have existing right to work.