Job Specifications
The AI orchestration of your wildest imagination.
n8n is the open workflow orchestration platform built for the new era of AI. We give technical teams the freedom of code with the speed of no-code, so they can automate faster, smarter, and without limits. Backed by a fiercely inventive community and 500+ builder-approved integrations, we’re changing the way people bring systems together and scale ideas for impact.
Since our founding in 2019, we’ve grown into a diverse team of over 220 - working across Europe and the US, connected by a shared builder spirit and with our centre of gravity in Berlin. Along the way, we’ve:
Cultivated a community of more than 650,000 active developers and builders
Earned 145k+ GitHub stars, making us one of the world’s Top 40 most popular projects
Been ranked as one of Europe’s most promising privately held SaaS startups (4th in Sifted’s 2025 B2B SaaS Rising 100)
Raised $240m to date, from Sequoia’s first German seed to our recent $180m Series C - bringing us to a $2.5bn valuation
That’s the company we’ve built. Now we’d love to see what you can build. If you’re applying, try n8n out - whether you’re technical or not - and share a screenshot of your first workflow with us. The easiest place to start is here: app.n8n.cloud/register.
We’re in a defining moment of an incredible journey. Come and build with us.
Your main goal will be to build and evolve the core platform foundations that power n8n’s workflow engine and frontend platform, so that 80+ product engineers (and the open-source community) can ship confidently across cloud and self-hosted deployments.
As part of the team, you'll share ownership of core platform domains and collectively drive measurable improvements to reliability, scalability, and performance:
Backend platform foundations (execution, orchestration, data)
Own and evolve backend subsystems like durable workflow execution & state, orchestration patterns, queue/task distribution, and system modularization.
Design for correctness and resilience (failure modes, idempotency, state machines) in systems that must work at scale across cloud and self-hosted.
Improve data architecture and database scaling, including performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
Frontend platform foundations (canvas, collaboration, performance)
Own and evolve the core canvas architecture and frontend platform primitives that enable complex workflow building experiences.
Build and improve real-time collaboration capabilities (e.g., WebSockets, CRDT-style approaches) with a focus on correctness and UX integrity at scale.
Drive performance and rendering improvements (e.g., web workers, rendering optimization), and strengthen platform contracts (plugin system, FE DX).
Architectural ownership & cross-team enablement
Drive technical decisions through clear proposals (e.g., RFCs), making trade-offs explicit and aligning stakeholders across teams.
Enable feature teams by defining stable platform contracts, supporting migrations, and reducing platform friction.
Mentor peers through reviews, pairing, and technical guidance — raising the bar for system design and maintainability.
Requirements
Must-haves
Systems thinking mindset: You think in invariants, correctness, trade-offs, and failure modes — and you enjoy foundational platform work over pure feature velocity.
Architectural ownership: You have led migrations, re-architected systems, or designed core components end-to-end, and can explain your decisions clearly.
TypeScript depth: You have strong TypeScript experience and you’re comfortable working in a large, evolving codebase.
Collaboration & enablement: You communicate well, work cross-functionally, and you’re motivated by helping other engineers ship safely through great platform contracts.
Long-horizon engineering: You’re energized by refactors, modularization, and making existing systems scalable and maintainable — not avoiding them.
For backend-focused candidates:
Node.js backend systems: You’ve built and operated backend systems in TypeScript/Node.js beyond CRUD.
Distributed systems: You understand event-driven patterns, idempotency, state machines, and reliability in distributed environments.
Data architecture at scale: You’ve worked on data intensive services at scale, including performance and operational considerations.
For frontend-focused candidates:
Complex frontend systems: You’ve built architecture-heavy frontend products (e.g., canvas, real-time, collaborative, or similarly complex apps).
Performance expertise: You have deep experience with rendering performance optimization and can measure and improve runtime behavior.
Modern frontend TypeScript: You’re strong in TypeScript frontend development; Vue experience is preferred but not required.
Nice-to-haves
Workflow/orchestration or devtools experience: You’ve worked on workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent SaaS.
Open-source experience: Y