Staff Core Platform Engineer

Responsibilities

• Shape and evolve the core platform architecture powering n8n across execution, infrastructure, data, and frontend platform systems.
• Drive architecture across the two Core Platform teams, ensuring systems evolve as a coherent whole.
• Design adaptable backend foundations supporting multiple workloads, deployment models, shared product needs, and future scale.
• Partner on frontend platform architecture, including canvas architecture, real-time communication, performance, plugin contracts, and platform primitives.
• Evolve 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, deployment abstractions, and operational maintainability.
• Lead technical decisions through proposals and RFCs, making trade-offs explicit and aligning engineers and stakeholders.
• Define stable platform interfaces and abstractions that reduce coupling and support safe migrations.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.

Requirements

• Track record of staff-level architectural ownership across multiple systems or teams, including migrations, re-architectures, or foundational platform initiatives.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to reason about invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs.
• Experience designing configurable, adaptable systems at scale.
• Deep experience designing and operating 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 are significant concerns.
• Strong TypeScript experience and substantial backend development with Node.js beyond conventional CRUD applications.
• Ability to provide cross-team technical leadership through communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship.
• Platform enablement mindset focused on clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experience.
• Interest in modularization, migrations, refactoring, and long-term engineering evolution.

Nice-to-haves

• Workflow, orchestration, developer tools, or infrastructure-heavy SaaS experience.
• Frontend platform architecture involving canvas applications, plugin systems, real-time applications, web workers, or complex rendering.
• Experience with event sourcing, sagas, durable execution, or related state-management patterns.
• Multi-tenant architecture experience.
• Open-source contribution or maintenance experience.
• Large-scale SaaS experience.
• Experience decomposing monoliths through incremental migrations.
• Experience supporting both managed cloud and self-hosted deployments.
• Observability, debugging, incident response, rollout safety, and operability experience.
• Strong computer science grounding in distributed systems, consistency models, consensus, formal methods, or related system-correctness concepts.

Compensation and Benefits

• Remote-first environment with autonomy and thoughtful experimentation.
• Visa sponsorship may be available.