Engineering Manager, Core Platform | Remote | Europe

The AI Orchestration Of Your Wildest Imagination

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. Along the way, we've:

• Cultivated a community of more than 650,000 active developers and builders
• Earned 190K+ GitHub stars, making us one of the world's Top 40 most popular projects
• Backed by top investors, from Sequoia's first German seed to our SAP's recent strategic investment - bringing us to a $5.2bn valuation

That's the company we've built. Now we'd love to see what you can build. If you're applying, try n8n out - whether you're technical or not - and share a screenshot of your first workflow with us. The easiest place to start is here: app.n8n.cloud/register.

We're in a defining moment of an incredible journey. Come and build with us.

Your main goal will be to build and lead one of two core platform teams that power n8n's workflow engine and frontend platform, enabling product engineers to ship confidently across cloud and self-hosted deployments.

To do so, you'll lead a technically strong platform team through foundational backend and frontend challenges while creating clarity, momentum, and a high bar for engineering quality:

Build And Grow A High-Performing Core Platform Team

• Lead, coach, and develop engineers working on the foundational systems that product teams and the community depend on.
• Create a high-trust environment where engineers can make strong technical decisions, grow in ownership, and do their best work together.
• Support hiring, onboarding, and team shaping as Platform Engineering grows and takes on broader ownership across n8n.

Drive Backend And Frontend Platform Evolution

• Guide the team's work across backend platform foundations such as durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue/task distribution, state handling, and data architecture.
• Support the evolution of frontend platform foundations including canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, rendering performance, and frontend developer experience.
• Help the team make sound technical decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, modularity, and maintainability across cloud and self-hosted environments.

Create Clarity, Alignment, And Delivery Momentum

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to align platform priorities with product and business outcomes.
• Turn complex platform problems into clear plans, helping the team balance speed, quality, reliability, and long-term architecture.
• Bring lightweight structure to planning and execution so the team can move quickly without introducing unnecessary process.

Lead With Technical Credibility And Platform Judgment

• Mentor engineers, challenge technical decisions thoughtfully, and maintain a high bar for engineering quality across foundational systems.
• Support technical direction through clear proposals, architectural discussions, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.
• Step into technical details or code when needed to unblock the team, while keeping your primary focus on people leadership and team effectiveness.

Requirements

Must-Haves

• First-line engineering management experience: You've been a first-line Engineering Manager for at least 2 years and have directly led engineers in a growing product or platform organization.
• Strong people leadership: You know how to coach, give clear feedback, support career growth, and handle hard conversations with empathy, honesty, and accountability.
• Platform and systems thinking: You think deeply about correctness, reliability, trade-offs, and long-term maintainability in foundational engineering systems.
• Hands-on software engineering background: You have strong engineering experience and can confidently mentor engineers, contribute to architecture discussions, and assess technical trade-offs.
• Technical depth in modern software systems: You can go deep into technical details or code to unblock, challenge, or support your team without becoming the critical path.
• Cross-functional alignment: You collaborate effectively with Product, Design, and engineering stakeholders to align different perspectives into a clear path forward.
• Composure in fast-moving environments: You help your team stay focused, confident, and effective as priorities evolve, bringing optimism, sound judgment, and clarity.
• High-growth SaaS experience: You've worked in a high-growth SaaS company and know how to scale teams, systems, and ways of working with intention.

Nice-To-Haves

• TypeScript / Node.js familiarity: You've worked with JavaScript, TypeScript, or Node.js and could quickly build context in our stack.
• Workflow, orchestration, or developer tools experience: You've worked on workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent SaaS products.
• Open-source experience: You've contributed to or maintained open-source software and understand public API contracts, backward compatibility, and community expectations.
• Large-scale SaaS exposure: You've worked on systems with meaningful scale, complexity, or reliability requirements.
• Frontend platform experience: You're familiar with complex frontend systems such as canvas-based products, collaborative applications, plugin systems, micro-frontends, or web workers.
• Backend platform experience: You've worked on distributed systems, event-driven patterns, queues, retries, idempotency, data-intensive services, or durable execution patterns.
• Multi-deployment awareness: You understand the complexity of building software that runs across both cloud and self-hosted environments.
• Observability mindset: You care about operability, instrumentation, debugging, rollout safety, and helping teams build systems they can confidently run.

Why join us?

At n8n, you'll join at a moment where strong engineering leadership can have outsized impact. We're building in a space that is moving quickly, and we see that as an opportunity: to help teams stay ambitious, grounded, and effective while shaping what great engineering leadership looks like in an AI-native company. You'll play a key role in building teams that empower others, act with integrity, move with speed and efficiency, and think bigger than incremental improvement. In a remote-first company growing fast, your work will directly influence how we scale our engineering organization and build the future of automation.

n8n is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We can sponsor visas to Germany; for any other country, you need to have existing right to work.

Our company language is English.

You care about diversity and inclusion? We do too! Check out our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging initiatives at n8n (

Location disclaimer: If you see multiple job postings for the same role, it is most likely because we're hiring remotely for this role and posting in different locations to make sure every potential candidate can see the role. Please apply to the location you're the most likely to work from in the future.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation – We offer fair and attractive pay.
• Ownership – Our core value is to "empower others," and we mean it—you'll get a slice of n8n with equity.
• Work/life balance – We work hard but ensure you have time to recharge:
• Europe: 30 days of vacation, plus public holidays wherever you are.
• US: 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays wherever you