Position: N8N Lead/Architect Location: San Diego, CA (5 Days work from office) Duration: Contract Rate: DOE
Summary
We're looking for a hands-on n8n expert with 3–4 years of core experience in designing, solutioning, building, deploying, and maintaining production-grade workflows using n8n. Should have extensive knowledge of automation of cross-system processes, integrate APIs and SaaS platforms, create custom nodes, and establish observability and governance for scalable, secure automations. You'll collaborate with product owners, SMEs, and platform teams to deliver business outcomes with high reliability and low operational overhead. Responsibilities
Design, Solution & Build Workflows: Develop modular, reusable n8n workflows to automate business processes (event-driven and scheduled).
Lead 2-3 n8n developers including troubleshooting
Integration Engineering: Connect to REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, OAuth2/JWT auth, and common SaaS apps (e.g., Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, HubSpot).
Custom n8n Nodes: Design, Build and maintain custom nodes (TypeScript/JavaScript) when native nodes don't meet requirements.
Data Handling: Transform, enrich, and validate data (JSON, XML, CSV); implement schema validation and error handling.
Deployment & CI/CD: Package and deploy n8n via Docker, configure environment variables/secrets, and integrate with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI).
Security & Compliance: Enforce least privilege, secrets management (e.g., Vault, n8n credentials), input sanitization, PII handling, and audit logging.
Monitoring & Observability: Configure health checks, log aggregation (e.g., ELK, Datadog), and metrics (throughput, latency, failure rates).
Documentation & Enablement: Produce workflow diagrams, runbooks, and versioned documentation; conduct knowledge transfer to ops and business users.
Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with business owners to refine requirements; deliver PoCs and then productionize with SLAs.
Governance: Adhere to automation standards, naming conventions, version control, and change-management procedures.
Must-Have Skills
Core n8n Expertise 8–10 Years Experience with 3-4 years in n8n:
Design and Building complex, multi-branch workflows and sub-workflows
Webhooks, triggers, and event-driven automations
n8n credentials, variables, binary data, and data passing
Error handling, try/catch patterns, and workflow-level fallbacks
Programming: Strong JavaScript/TypeScript for functions, expressions, and custom nodes.
Enhance workflows with AI agents by leveraging LLMs for intelligent task automation.
Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases.
API Integration: REST/GraphQL, pagination, rate-limiting, authentication (OAuth2, API keys, JWT), and API contract testing.
DevOps: Docker-based deployments, environment promotion (dev/test/prod), CI/CD, version control (Git), and configuration-as-code.
Data & Messaging: JSON manipulation, queues/pub-sub (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS), and webhook architectures.
