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n8n is an open-source workflow orchestration platform for the AI era, enabling technical teams to automate at scale with the flexibility of code and speed of no-code. The company has grown to 260+ employees across Europe and the US, with 650K+ active developers, 190K+ GitHub stars, and a $5.2bn valuation backed by Sequoia and SAP.
You will shape and evolve the core platform architecture powering n8n, creating scalable, configurable foundations across execution, infrastructure, and frontend systems. This enables 80+ product engineers and the open-source community to build confidently across cloud and self-hosted deployments.
Key responsibilities include:
**Architectural Direction**: Drive architecture across Core Platform teams, ensuring execution, infrastructure, data, and frontend systems evolve coherently. Design highly adaptable backend foundations supporting different workloads, deployment models, and future scale without unnecessary complexity. Partner on core canvas architecture, real-time communication, performance, and plugin contracts.
**Execution & Distributed Systems**: Evolve core subsystems including durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue and task distribution, worker management, scheduling, and horizontal scaling. Design for correctness and resilience across distributed environments, handling failure modes, idempotency, state transitions, tenant isolation, and reliability guarantees. Shape data and persistence architecture including database scaling, sharding, migrations, and operational maintainability.
**Platform Engineering & Enablement**: Lead technical decisions through clear proposals and RFCs, making trade-offs explicit. Define stable platform interfaces and abstractions reducing coupling and supporting safe migrations. Mentor engineers across teams through design reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.
Must-haves: Staff-level architectural ownership with track record leading architecture across multiple systems or teams; deep systems thinking about invariants, correctness, and trade-offs; experience designing configurable systems at scale; distributed systems depth (asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, resilience); data architecture at scale with meaningful persistence and operational concerns; strong TypeScript and substantial Node.js backend systems experience; cross-team technical leadership through judgment and mentorship; platform enablement mindset; long-horizon engineering perspective.
Nice-to-haves: Workflow, orchestration, or devtools experience; frontend platform architecture (canvas, plugins, real-time, web workers); durable execution patterns (event sourcing, sagas); multi-tenant architecture design.
