Staff Core Platform Engineer

About the role

As a Staff Core Platform Engineer you will shape and evolve the core platform architecture that powers n8n, enabling both cloud and self‑hosted deployments. You will create scalable, configurable foundations that allow product engineers and the open‑source community to build confidently.

Key responsibilities

• Define and drive architectural direction across the two Core Platform teams, ensuring coherence between execution, infrastructure, data, and frontend systems.
• Design adaptable backend foundations that support diverse workloads, deployment models, and future scale without unnecessary complexity.
• Partner with the frontend platform workstream on core canvas architecture, real‑time communication, performance, and plugin contracts.
• Evolve core subsystems such as durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue and task distribution, worker management, scheduling, and horizontal scaling.
• Ensure correctness and resilience across distributed environments, handling failure modes, idempotency, state transitions, tenant isolation, and reliability guarantees.
• Shape data and persistence architecture, including database scaling, sharding, migration strategies, and long‑term operational maintainability.
• Lead consequential technical decisions through clear proposals and cross‑team collaboration.

Required profile

• Proven experience designing and delivering large‑scale platform architectures.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and reliability engineering.
• Ability to influence multiple engineering teams and make long‑term technical decisions.
• Strong communication skills to work with product engineers and an active open‑source community.

Required skills

• Backend development and architecture design.
• Frontend platform integration.
• Distributed systems engineering.
• Database scaling, sharding, and migration strategies.

What we offer

• Opportunity to influence a fast‑growing AI workflow platform.
• Collaborative environment with a diverse, global team.
• Access to a vibrant open‑source community and cutting‑edge technologies.