Logo for n8n

Engineering Manager, Core Platform | Remote | Europe

Role overview

Qualifications

  • First-line Engineering Manager experience for at least 2 years leading engineers in a growing product or platform organization
  • Strong people leadership with ability to coach, provide clear feedback, support career growth, and handle difficult conversations with empathy and accountability
  • Platform and systems thinking with focus on correctness, reliability, and long-term maintainability in foundational engineering systems
  • Hands-on software engineering background with ability to mentor engineers, contribute to architecture discussions, and assess technical trade-offs

Responsibilities

  • Build and lead a high-performing Core Platform team, guiding backend and frontend platform evolution and aligning platform work with product and business outcomes
  • Mentor engineers, coach for growth, and maintain a high bar for engineering quality while fostering a high-trust environment for strong technical decisions
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Engineering to set platform priorities, translate complex platform problems into clear plans, and maintain delivery momentum
  • Own technical architecture and design decisions for scalability, reliability, and maintainability across cloud and self-hosted deployments, including backend platform foundations (durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue/task distribution, state handling, data architecture) and frontend platform foundations (canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, rendering performance, and developer experience)

About the company

n8n logo

n8n

Free, open and self-hostable workflow automation tool. n8n is the leading low-code automation tool, enabling you to connect anything to everything. With n8n, for the first time, people can move beyond simple integrations to build multi-step workflows that combine both 3rd party APIs and your own internal tools to create easy-to-use automations. Thanks to its fair-code distribution model, n8n will always have visible source code, be available to self-host, and allow you to add your own custom functions, logic, and apps. n8n is supported by a fast-growing and passionate community of thousands of people building a powerful and extendable workflow automation tool. n8n is privately held, with funding from Sequoia, Felicis Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Harpoon Ventures, and others. Individual investors include Eventbrite's Kevin Hartz and Supercell's IIkka Paananen. n8n was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Berlin.

Company details

Company typeStartup
Industry
Company size51 - 200

Your match analysis

See how your profile stacks up against this role.

We compared the job requirements to your profile to show where you're strong and where you fall short.

Job description

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 lead one of two Core Platform teams that power n8n’s workflow engine and frontend platform, enabling product engineers to ship confidently across cloud and self-hosted deployments.

To do so, you’ll lead a technically strong platform team through foundational backend and frontend challenges while creating clarity, momentum, and a high bar for engineering quality:

Build and grow a high-performing Core Platform team

  • Lead, coach, and develop engineers working on the foundational systems that product teams and the community depend on.

  • Create a high-trust environment where engineers can make strong technical decisions, grow in ownership, and do their best work together.

  • Support hiring, onboarding, and team shaping as Platform Engineering grows and takes on broader ownership across n8n.

Drive backend and frontend platform evolution

  • Guide the team’s work across backend platform foundations such as durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue/task distribution, state handling, and data architecture.

  • Support the evolution of frontend platform foundations including canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, rendering performance, and frontend developer experience.

  • Help the team make sound technical decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, modularity, and maintainability across cloud and self-hosted environments.

Create clarity, alignment, and delivery momentum

  • Partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to align platform priorities with product and business outcomes.

  • Turn complex platform problems into clear plans, helping the team balance speed, quality, reliability, and long-term architecture.

  • Bring lightweight structure to planning and execution so the team can move quickly without introducing unnecessary process.

Lead with technical credibility and platform judgment

  • Mentor engineers, challenge technical decisions thoughtfully, and maintain a high bar for engineering quality across foundational systems.

  • Support technical direction through clear proposals, architectural discussions, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.

  • Step into technical details or code when needed to unblock the team, while keeping your primary focus on people leadership and team effectiveness.

REQUIREMENTS

Must-haves

  • 🌱 First-line engineering management experience: You’ve been a first-line Engineering Manager for at least 2 years and have directly led engineers in a growing product or platform organization.

  • 🤝 Strong people leadership: You know how to coach, give clear feedback, support career growth, and handle hard conversations with empathy, honesty, and accountability.

  • 🧠 Platform and systems thinking: You think deeply about correctness, reliability, trade-offs, and long-term maintainability in foundational engineering systems.

  • ⚙️ Hands-on software engineering background: You have strong engineering experience and can confidently mentor engineers, contribute to architecture discussions, and assess technical trade-offs.

  • 🛠️ Technical depth in modern software systems: You can go deep into technical details or code to unblock, challenge, or support your team without becoming the critical path.

  • 🔄 Cross-functional alignment: You collaborate effectively with Product, Design, and engineering stakeholders to align different perspectives into a clear path forward.

  • 🏎️ Composure in fast-moving environments: You help your team stay focused, confident, and effective as priorities evolve, bringing optimism, sound judgment, and clarity.

  • 🏢 High-growth SaaS experience: You’ve worked in a high-growth SaaS company and know how to scale teams, systems, and ways of working with intention.

Nice-to-haves

  • 🧩 TypeScript / Node.js familiarity: You’ve worked with JavaScript, TypeScript, or Node.js and could quickly build context in our stack.

  • 🧰 Workflow, orchestration, or developer tools experience: You’ve worked on workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent SaaS products.

  • 🌍 Open-source experience: You’ve contributed to or maintained open-source software and understand public API contracts, backward compatibility, and community expectations.

  • 📈 Large-scale SaaS exposure: You’ve worked on systems with meaningful scale, complexity, or reliability requirements.

  • 🧱 Frontend platform experience: You’re familiar with complex frontend systems such as canvas-based products, collaborative applications, plugin systems, micro-frontends, or web workers.

  • 🗄️ Backend platform experience: You’ve worked on distributed systems, event-driven patterns, queues, retries, idempotency, data-intensive services, or durable execution patterns.

  • ☁️ Multi-deployment awareness: You understand the complexity of building software that runs across both cloud and self-hosted environments.

  • 🔭 Observability mindset: You care about operability, instrumentation, debugging, rollout safety, and helping teams build systems they can confidently run.

Why join us?

At n8n, you’ll join at a moment where strong engineering leadership can have outsized impact. We’re building in a space that is moving quickly, and we see that as an opportunity: to help teams stay ambitious, grounded, and effective while shaping what great engineering leadership looks like in an AI-native company. You’ll play a key role in building teams that empower others, act with integrity, move with speed and efficiency, and think bigger than incremental improvement. In a remote-first company growing fast, your work will directly influence how we scale our engineering organization and build the future of automation.

n8n is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We can sponsor visas to Germany; for any other country, you need to have existing right to work.

Our company language is English.

You care about diversity and inclusion? We do too! Check out our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging initiatives at n8n (https://www.notion.so/n8n/Diversity-inclusion-and-belonging-n8n-c1bec2fff536422d868b1a438d990e35).

Location disclaimer: If you see multiple job postings for the same role, it is most likely because we're hiring remotely for this role and posting in different locations to make sure every potential candidate can see the role. Please apply to the location you're the most likely to work from in the future.

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation 💸 – We offer fair and attractive pay.

  • Ownership 💪 – Our core value is to “empower others,” and we mean it—you’ll get a slice of n8n with equity.

  • Work/life balance 🏖️ – We work hard but ensure you have time to recharge:

    • Europe: 30 days of vacation, plus public holidays wherever you are.

    • US: 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays wherever you are.

  • Health & wellness 🩺 –

    • Europe: We provide benefits according to local country norms.*

    • US: Multiple low-premium, low-deductible medical plans with coverage for individuals and families—plus a no-cost premium HDHP option with a pre-seeded HSA—along with dental and vision coverage.

  • Future planning 💰 –

    • Europe: We provide pension contributions according to local country norms.*

    • US: 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% employer match.

  • Financial security 🛡️ –

    • Europe: We provide benefits according to local country norms.*

    • US: Company-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, plus life insurance to support you and your loved ones.

  • Career growth 📈 – We hire rising stars who grow with us! You’ll get €1K (or equivalent) per year to spend on courses, books, events, or coaching to level up your skills.

  • A passionate team 🤩 – We love our product, and we prove it with regular hackathons where we see who can build the coolest thing with it!

  • Remote-first 🌏 – Our team works remotely across Europe, with regular off-sites for team bonding. Some roles, like sales in the US, are hybrid—please check the job description.

  • Giving back 🤝 – We're big fans of open source, and you'll get $100 per month to support projects you care about.

  • AI enablement 🤖 – We believe in working smarter—everyone gets an unlimited AI budget to explore and use the best tools to boost productivity and creativity.

  • Transparency 🙏 – We all know what everyone’s working on, how the company is doing—the whole shebang.

  • An ambitious but kind culture 😍 – People love working here—our eNPS for 2024 is 94!

* Country-specific details are provided in your contract.

Apply once. Then go straight to the hiring manager.

After you apply, unlock the direct contact details of the people who actually make the call. A quick follow-up makes you 5x more likely to land an interview.

MR

Marcus Rivera

Chief Revenue Officer

m.rivera@company.com
linkedin.com/in/marcusrivera
Unlocked after you apply
·

Engineering Manager Related jobs

Other jobs at n8n

Premium

Reach out to the hiring manager directly.

Gain access to the contact details of the hiring managers who actually decide, and reach out to network with them directly. That, plus more when you upgrade:

  • Full match report with fit score and gaps
  • Career diagnostics on how recruiters read you
  • Curated company matches and warm intros
  • 48h early access to new roles

Cancel anytime.