Engineering Manager, Core Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Germany.

📋 Description

• Develop and expand a high-achieving Core Platform team.

• Lead, mentor, and nurture engineers who are responsible for the foundational systems relied upon by product teams and the community.

• Foster a high-trust atmosphere where engineers can make robust technical decisions, take ownership, and collaborate effectively.

• Assist in recruitment, onboarding, and team structuring as Platform Engineering scales and embraces broader responsibilities across n8n.

• Propel the evolution of backend and frontend platforms.

• Direct the team’s efforts on backend platform fundamentals such as durable workflow execution, orchestration, queue/task distribution, state management, and data architecture.

• Facilitate the advancement of frontend platform essentials including canvas architecture, real-time collaboration, rendering efficiency, and frontend developer experience.

• Aid the team in making informed technical choices regarding scalability, reliability, performance, modularity, and maintainability across both cloud and self-hosted environments.

• Establish clarity, alignment, and delivery momentum.

• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to ensure platform priorities align with product and business goals.

• Transform complex platform challenges into straightforward plans, assisting the team in balancing speed, quality, reliability, and long-term architecture.

• Introduce a lightweight structure to planning and execution, enabling the team to operate swiftly without unnecessary processes.

• Lead with technical expertise and sound platform judgment.

• Mentor engineers, thoughtfully challenge technical decisions, and uphold high standards for engineering quality across foundational systems.

• Guide technical direction through well-defined proposals, architectural discussions, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.

• Engage in technical details or code when necessary to support the team, while keeping your primary focus on leadership and team effectiveness.

⛳️ Requirements

• 🌱 Experience in first-line engineering management: You have served as a first-line Engineering Manager for a minimum of 2 years, leading engineers in a growing product or platform organization.

• 🤝 Strong leadership abilities: You excel in coaching, providing clear feedback, supporting career development, and managing difficult conversations with empathy, honesty, and accountability.

• 🧠 Systems and platform thinking: You possess a deep understanding of correctness, reliability, trade-offs, and long-term maintainability in foundational engineering systems.

• ⚙️ Hands-on software engineering experience: You have a solid engineering background and can confidently mentor engineers, participate in architecture discussions, and evaluate technical trade-offs.

• 🛠️ Technical proficiency in modern software systems: You can delve into technical details or code to unblock, challenge, or assist your team without becoming the bottleneck.

• 🔄 Cross-functional collaboration: You work effectively with Product, Design, and engineering stakeholders to unify various perspectives into a clear path forward.

• 🏎️ Composure in dynamic environments: You help your team maintain focus, confidence, and effectiveness as priorities shift, offering optimism, sound judgment, and clarity.

• 🏢 Experience in high-growth SaaS: You have worked in a high-growth SaaS company and understand how to intentionally scale teams, systems, and workflows.

• 🧩 Familiarity with TypeScript / Node.js: You have experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or Node.js and can quickly gain context in our stack.

• 🧰 Experience with workflow, orchestration, or developer tools: You have been involved in workflow engines, orchestration platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure-adjacent SaaS products.

• 🌍 Open-source involvement: You have contributed to or maintained open-source software and are knowledgeable about public API contracts, backward compatibility, and community expectations.

• 📈 Exposure to large-scale SaaS: You have experience with systems that have significant scale, complexity, or reliability demands.

• 🧱 Frontend platform knowledge: You are versed in complex frontend systems such as canvas-based products, collaborative applications, plugin systems, micro-frontends, or web workers.

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

• ☁️ Understanding of multi-deployment: You recognize the complexities of developing software that operates across both cloud and self-hosted environments.

• 🔭 Observability focus: You prioritize operability, instrumentation, debugging, rollout safety, and assisting teams in creating systems they can confidently manage.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation

• Ownership

• Work/life balance

• Health & wellness

• Future planning

• Financial security

• Career growth

• A passionate team

• Remote-first

• Giving back

• AI enablement

• Transparency

• An ambitious but kind culture