Staff Core Platform Engineer

Role Description

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.

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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, and you’re comfortable making decisions where there is no obviously perfect solution.
• Configurable systems at scale: You’ve designed highly configurable, adaptable systems that serve multiple use cases or operating modes without becoming brittle or excessively complex.
• 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, helping multiple teams converge on better solutions without relying on formal authority.
• Platform enablement mindset: You care about creating clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences that allow other engineers to move faster and more safely.
• Long-horizon engineering: You’re energized by modularization, migrations, refactoring, and evolving existing systems while keeping the product and engineering organization moving.

Requirements

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

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 are.
• Health & wellness:
  • Europe: We provide benefits according to local country norms.
  • US: Multiple low-premium, low-deductible medical plans with coverage for individuals and families—plus a no-cost premium HDHP option with a pre-seeded HSA—along with dental and vision coverage.
• Future planning:
  • Europe: We provide pension contributions according to local country norms.
  • US: 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% employer match.
• Financial security:
  • Europe: We provide benefits according to local country norms.
  • US: Company-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, plus life insurance to support you and your loved ones.
• Career growth: We hire rising stars who grow with us! You’ll get €1K (or equivalent) per year to spend on courses, books, events, or coaching to level up your skills.
• A passionate team: We love our product, and we prove it with regular hackathons where we see who can build the coolest thing with it!
• Remote-first: Our team works remotely across Europe, with regular off-sites for team bonding. Some roles, like sales in the US, are hybrid—please check the job description.
• Giving back: We're big fans of open source, and you'll get $100 per month to support projects you care about.
• AI enablement: We believe in working smarter—everyone gets an unlimited AI budget to explore and use the best tools to boost productivity and creativity.
• Transparency: We all know what everyone’s working on, how the company is doing—the whole shebang.