Staff Core Platform Engineer

n8n is an open workflow orchestration platform for the new era of AI, offering a blend of code freedom and no-code speed. Founded in 2019, the company has grown to over 260 employees working across Europe and the US, with its headquarters in Berlin. It has a large active community of developers and has been backed by top investors, reaching a $5.2bn valuation.

• Staff-level architectural ownership across multiple systems or teams.
• Deep systems thinking about correctness, failure modes, and trade-offs.
• Experience designing configurable, adaptable systems at scale.
• Expertise in distributed systems concepts like asynchronous processing and idempotency.
• Experience with data architecture focusing on persistence, performance, and operational reliability.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Node.js, with backend system development beyond CRUD.
• Cross-team technical leadership through communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship.
• Platform enablement mindset focusing on contracts, abstractions, and developer experience.
• Capability in modularization, migrations, refactoring of long-lived systems.

Nice to have:

• Experience with workflow engines, orchestration platforms, or devtools.
• Frontend platform architecture experience with complex systems like canvas applications.
• Knowledge of durable execution patterns such as event sourcing and sagas.
• Multi-tenant architecture design experience.
• Open-source software contribution or maintenance.
• Large-scale SaaS operational experience.
• Experience with monolith to modular migrations.
• Awareness of multi-deployment environments (cloud and self-hosted).
• Observability and system instrumentation mindset.
• Strong grounding in computer science concepts related to distributed systems and system correctness.

Architectural direction across Core Platform:

• Drive architecture across two Core Platform teams, ensuring systems evolve as a coherent whole.
• Design adaptable backend foundations supporting various workloads and deployment models.
• Partner with frontend platform on core canvas architecture and other platform primitives.

Execution, distributed systems & data foundations:

• Evolve core subsystems like durable workflow execution, orchestration, task distribution, and scaling.
• Design for resilience, idempotency, tenant isolation, and reliability in distributed environments.
• Shape data and persistence architecture, including scaling, sharding, and migration strategies.

Platform architecture & engineering enablement:

• Lead architectural decisions with clear proposals and RFCs.
• Define stable platform interfaces to reduce coupling and support migrations.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical guidance to raise standards.

n8n is an equal opportunity employer abiding by non-discrimination policies. Visa sponsorship is available for Germany; candidates for other countries must have existing work authorization. The company language is English.