Engineering Manager, Core Platform | Remote | Europe

About the role

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. 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.

What you'll do

• Lead, coach, and develop engineers working on the foundational systems that product teams and the community depend on.
• 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.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to align platform priorities with product and business outcomes.
• 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.

What you'll need

• First-line Engineering Manager experience for at least 2 years with directly led engineers in a growing product or platform organization.
• Strong people leadership: coaching, clear feedback, support for career growth, and hard conversations with empathy, honesty, and accountability.
• Platform and systems thinking with deep understanding of correctness, reliability, trade-offs, and long-term maintainability in foundational engineering systems.
• Strong engineering experience and ability to confidently mentor engineers, contribute to architecture discussions, and assess technical trade-offs.
• Technical depth to go into technical details or code to unblock, challenge, or support your team without becoming the critical path.
• Effective collaboration with Product, Design, and engineering stakeholders to align different perspectives.
• High-growth SaaS experience with knowledge of scaling teams, systems, and ways of working with intention.

Nice to have

• TypeScript / Node.js familiarity.
• Workflow, orchestration, or developer tools experience.
• Open-source experience and understanding of public API contracts, backward compatibility, and community expectations.
• Frontend platform experience with complex frontend systems such as canvas-based products or collaborative applications.
• Backend platform experience with distributed systems, event-driven patterns, queues, retries, or durable execution patterns.