Engineering Manager, Core Platform | Remote | Europe

Location: Quarto d'Altino

Overview
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+ Git Hub 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.
Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Qualifications
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.
Cros…