Staff Core Platform Engineer

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.

What you'll do

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

What you'll need

• Track record of leading architecture across multiple systems or teams, including migrations, re-architectures, or foundational platform initiatives with long-term organizational impact.
• Deep reasoning about invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs, comfortable making decisions where there is no obviously perfect solution.
• Experience designing highly configurable, adaptable systems that serve multiple use cases or operating modes without becoming brittle or excessively complex.
• Depth in distributed systems involving asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, and resilience.
• Experience with data-intensive systems where persistence, performance, isolation, migrations, and operational reliability were meaningful architectural concerns.
• Strong TypeScript experience and substantial backend systems built with Node.js beyond conventional CRUD applications.
• Influence through technical judgment, clear communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship, helping multiple teams converge on better solutions.
• Platform enablement mindset: care about creating clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences that allow other engineers to move faster and more safely.

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-heavy SaaS products.
• Work on architecture-heavy frontend systems such as canvas applications, plugin systems, real-time applications, or complex rendering environments.
• Experience designing or operating systems using event sourcing, sagas, durable execution, or related state-management patterns.
• Multi-tenant architecture design where tenant isolation, resource management, or noisy-neighbour concerns were important.
• Open-source contributions or maintenance experience with understanding of public contracts and backward compatibility.
• Large-scale SaaS exposure or work in environments where reliability and architectural decisions had broad customer impact.