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Engineering Manager, Core Platform

TrulyRemote Verified

Hand-curated global remote job with direct application link

Technical Requirements

TypeScriptNode.jsJavaScriptDistributed SystemsWorkflow EnginesOrchestration Platforms

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.

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.

Engineering Manager, Core Platform
n8n
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