n8n is an open workflow orchestration platform built for the new era of AI
Backed by a community of 650,000+ active developers and builders
190K+ GitHub stars, one of the world's Top 40 most popular projects
$5.2bn valuation, backed by Sequoia and SAP
Team of 260+ across Europe and the US, centre of gravity in Berlin
Responsibilities
Drive architecture across the two Core Platform teams, ensuring execution, infrastructure, data, and frontend platform systems evolve as a coherent whole
Design highly adaptable backend foundations supporting different workloads, deployment models, and future scale
Partner with the FE platform workstream on core canvas architecture, real-time communication, performance, and plugin contracts
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 data and persistence architecture, including database scaling, sharding, migration strategies, and deployment abstractions
Lead consequential technical decisions through clear proposals and RFCs
Define stable platform interfaces and abstractions that reduce coupling
Mentor engineers across all engineering teams through design reviews, pairing, and technical guidance
Requirements
Staff-level architectural ownership across multiple systems or teams
Systems thinking: invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs
Experience designing highly configurable, adaptable systems at scale
Distributed systems depth: asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, resilience
Data architecture at scale: persistence, performance, isolation, migrations, operational reliability
Strong TypeScript and Node.js experience, building substantial backend systems beyond CRUD
Cross-team technical leadership through technical judgment, clear communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship
Platform enablement mindset: clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences