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n8n is an open workflow orchestration platform built for AI, enabling technical teams to automate faster with the freedom of code and speed of no-code. The company has grown to 260+ employees across Europe and the US since 2019, with 650K+ active developers, 190K+ GitHub stars, and a $5.2bn valuation backed by Sequoia and SAP.
As Staff Core Platform Engineer, you will shape and evolve the core platform architecture powering n8n, creating scalable, configurable foundations that enable 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 platform 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, addressing failure modes, idempotency, state transitions, tenant isolation, and reliability guarantees. Shape data and persistence architecture including database scaling, sharding, migrations, and operational maintainability.
**Technical Leadership & Enablement**: Lead consequential 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.
Required qualifications: Staff-level architectural ownership with track record leading architecture across multiple systems or teams; deep systems thinking about invariants, correctness, and failure modes; experience designing configurable systems at scale; distributed systems depth (asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, resilience); data architecture at scale; strong TypeScript and substantial Node.js backend experience; cross-team technical leadership through influence and mentorship; platform enablement mindset; long-horizon engineering perspective.
Nice-to-haves: workflow/orchestration/devtools experience; frontend platform architecture; durable execution patterns (event sourcing, sagas); multi-tenant architecture; open-source contributions.
