Staff Core Platform Engineer

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. 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.

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.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation: We offer fair and attractive pay.
• Ownership: You’ll get a slice of n8n with equity.
• Work/life balance: 30 days of vacation for Europe, plus public holidays.
• Health & wellness: Benefits provided according to local country norms.
• Future planning: Pension contributions provided according to local country norms.
• Financial security: Benefits provided according to local country norms.
• Career growth: You’ll get €1K (or equivalent) per year to spend on courses, books, events, or coaching.
• A passionate team: Regular hackathons.
• Remote-first: Our team works remotely across Europe, with regular off-sites for team bonding.
• Giving back: You'll get $100 per month to support open source projects you care about.
• Transparency: We all know what everyone’s working on and how the company is doing.

Must-haves

• Staff-level architectural ownership: You have a 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: You reason deeply about invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs.
• Configurable systems at scale: You’ve designed highly configurable, adaptable systems that serve multiple use cases or operating modes.
• Distributed systems depth: You’ve designed and operated distributed systems involving concepts such as asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, and resilience.
• Data architecture at scale: You’ve worked on data-intensive systems where persistence, performance, isolation, migrations, and operational reliability were meaningful architectural concerns.
• TypeScript & Node.js depth: You have strong TypeScript experience and have built substantial backend systems with Node.js beyond conventional CRUD applications.
• Cross-team technical leadership: You influence through technical judgment, clear communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship.
• Platform enablement mindset: You care about creating clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences.
• Long-horizon engineering: You’re energized by modularization, migrations, refactoring, and evolving existing systems.

Nice-to-haves

• Workflow, orchestration or devtools experience.
• Frontend platform architecture (canvas applications, plugin systems, real-time applications).
• Durable execution patterns (event sourcing, sagas, durable execution).
• Multi-tenant architecture experience.
• Open-source experience.
• Large-scale SaaS exposure.
• Monolith to modular migrations experience.
• Multi-deployment awareness (managed cloud and self-hosted).
• Observability mindset.
• Strong CS grounding (distributed systems concepts, consistency models, consensus).