Staff Core Platform Engineer

The role

You will shape and evolve the core platform architecture for n8n. This includes creating scalable foundations across execution, infrastructure, and frontend platform for product engineers and the open-source community.

What you will do

• Drive architecture across the two Core Platform teams
• Design highly adaptable backend foundations
• Partner with the FE platform workstream on core canvas architecture and platform primitives
• Evolve core subsystems including durable workflow execution, orchestration, and scaling
• Design for correctness and resilience across distributed environments
• Shape data and persistence architecture
• Lead technical decisions through proposals and RFCs
• Define stable platform interfaces and abstractions
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and technical guidance

Required qualifications

• Staff-level architectural ownership with a track record of leading architecture across multiple systems or teams
• Systems thinking regarding invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs
• Experience designing highly configurable, adaptable systems at scale
• Depth in distributed systems including asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, and resilience
• Experience with data architecture at scale including persistence, performance, isolation, and migrations
• Strong TypeScript experience
• Substantial backend systems experience with Node.js
• Cross-team technical leadership through technical judgment, communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship
• Platform enablement mindset for creating clear contracts and abstractions
• Experience with modularization, migrations, and refactoring existing systems

Nice to have

• Workflow, orchestration or devtools experience
• Frontend platform architecture experience
• Durable execution patterns experience
• Multi-tenant architecture experience
• Open-source experience
• Large-scale SaaS exposure
• Monolith to modular migrations experience
• Multi-deployment awareness
• Observability mindset
• Strong CS grounding in distributed systems concepts, consistency models, or consensus

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Equity
• Europe: 30 days of vacation plus public holidays
• US: 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays
• Europe: Benefits according to local country norms
• US: Medical plans, dental and vision coverage
• Europe: Pension contributions according to local country norms
• US: 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% employer match
• US: Company-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, plus life insurance
• €1K (or equivalent) per year for courses, books, events, or coaching
• Regular hackathons
• Remote-first environment

Before you apply

• Try n8n out and share a screenshot of your first workflow with the company
• We can sponsor visas to Germany
• For any other country, you need to have existing right to work

About the company

n8n is an open workflow orchestration platform. The team has over 260 members working across Europe and the US.