Staff Platform Architect

Your main goal

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.

Working across our platform teams, you’ll bring architectural coherence to the systems they jointly own and help us make the right long-term technical decisions as n8n scales:

Architectural direction across Core Platform

• 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.
• Partner with the FE platform workstream on core canvas architecture, real-time communication, performance, plugin contracts, and other platform primitives used by product teams.

Execution, distributed systems & data foundations

• 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 our data and persistence architecture, including database scaling, sharding, migration strategies, deployment abstractions, and long-term operational maintainability.

Platform architecture & engineering enablement

• 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.

REQUIREMENTS

Must-haves

• 🏗️ Staff-level architectural ownership: You have a track record of leading architecture across multiple systems or teams, including migrations, re-architectures, or foundational platform initiatives with long-term organizational impact.
• 🧠 Systems thinking: You reason deeply about invariants, correctness, failure modes, boundaries, and trade-offs, and you’re comfortable making decisions where there is no obviously perfect solution.
• ⚙️ Configurable systems at scale: You’ve designed highly configurable, adaptable systems that serve multiple use cases or operating modes without becoming brittle or excessively complex.
• 🌐 Distributed systems depth: You’ve designed and operated distributed systems involving concepts such as asynchronous processing, idempotency, state machines, queues, consistency, and resilience.
• 🗄️ Data architecture at scale: You’ve worked on data-intensive systems where persistence, performance, isolation, migrations, and operational reliability were meaningful architectural concerns.
• 🛠️ TypeScript & Node.js depth: You have strong TypeScript experience and have built substantial backend systems with Node.js beyond conventional CRUD applications.
• 🤝 Cross-team technical leadership: You influence through technical judgment, clear communication, RFCs, design reviews, and mentorship, helping multiple teams converge on better solutions without relying on formal authority.
• 🧱 Platform enablement mindset: You care about creating clear contracts, abstractions, and developer experiences that allow other engineers to move faster and more safely.
• 🧹 Long-horizon engineering: You’re energized by modularization, migrations, refactoring, and evolving existing systems while keeping the product and engineering organization moving.

Nice-to-haves

• 🧰 Workflow, orchestration or devtools experience: You’ve worked on workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-heavy SaaS products.
• 🖥️ Frontend platform architecture: You’ve worked with architecture-heavy frontend systems such as canvas applications, plugin systems, real-time applications, web workers, or complex rendering environments.
• 🧾 Durable execution patterns: You’ve designed or operated systems using event sourcing, sagas, durable execution, or related state-management patterns.
• 👥 Multi-tenant architecture: You’ve designed systems where tenant isolation, resource management, data boundaries, or noisy-neighbour concerns were important.
• 🌍 Open-source experience: You’ve contributed to or maintained open-source software and understand the additional pressure around public contracts and backward compatibility.
• 📈 Large-scale SaaS exposure: You’ve operated systems at meaningful scale or worked in environments where reliability and architectural decisions had broad customer impact.
• 🧩 Monolith → modular migrations: You’ve decomposed monolithic systems or led incremental architectural migrations without preventing product teams from continuing to ship.
• ☁️ Multi-deployment awareness: You’ve designed products that need to work consistently across both managed cloud and self-hosted environments.
• 🔭 Observability mindset: You think about instrumentation, debugging, incident response, rollout safety, and operability as part of system design rather than an afterthought.
• 🧪 Strong CS grounding: You bring deep knowledge of distributed systems concepts, consistency models, consensus, formal methods, or similarly rigorous approaches to system correctness.

Why join us?

At n8n, you’ll work on the foundations that almost every product experience depends on. You’ll have influence across two Core Platform teams, helping shape how our execution engine, infrastructure, data architecture, and frontend platform evolve together as both our product and engineering organization scale.

This is a Staff role with real architectural leverage: you’ll tackle problems that span team boundaries, evolve systems that already operate at meaningful scale, and create platform capabilities that make 80+ engineers more effective. You’ll do that in a remote-first environment that values autonomy, thoughtful experimentation, and engineers who influence through strong technical judgment rather than hierarchy.

Sound like the kind of platform challenge you want to own?

Apply now — and help us build the future of automation.