About n8n
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 260 - working across Europe and the US, connected by a shared builder spirit and with our centre of gravity in Berlin.
AI Engineering Manager
Your main goal will be to build and lead an engineering team that thrives in a fast-moving agentic, AI-native world—developing engineers, creating clarity, and delivering meaningful outcomes with strong technical judgment. This is a first-line engineering leadership role for someone who is deeply technical, but whose real strength is building teams: empowering engineers on their growth path, aligning stakeholders, and helping people move with confidence as AI agents, workflow automation, and user expectations evolve rapidly.
You will lead teams working on AI agents and agentic workflows within n8n, enabling users to orchestrate complex, multi-step automation across tools, data, and models. This includes shaping how LLMs, tools, APIs, and workflows come together into reliable, composable systems that users can trust in production.
Responsibilities
- Build an empowered, high-performing AI agent & evaluation team
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers building agent-based systems, workflow orchestration capabilities, and AI-powered nodes.
- Foster a culture of experimentation and rapid iteration, where engineers continuously improve prompts, tool usage, and workflow logic based on real-world outcomes.
- Help your team think in terms of systems, not features—designing reliable agentic workflows rather than one-off AI calls.
- Support hiring and team shaping with a focus on AI engineering, distributed systems thinking, and product-minded builders.
- Create clarity in an agentic, fast-evolving landscape
- Help your team navigate a space where agents, tools, memory, and orchestration patterns are still emerging and rapidly changing.
- Translate evolving AI capabilities into clear product and engineering direction for n8n workflows, nodes, and automation primitives.
- Guide decisions around agent architecture (e.g., single-agent vs multi-agent workflows, tool selection, memory strategies, human-in-the-loop design).
- Cut through hype and ambiguity to focus on what delivers real, reliable value to users building automations.
- Drive execution of agentic workflows at scale
- Partner with Product and Design to define and ship agent-powered workflow experiences that feel intuitive, composable, and powerful.
- Ensure the team delivers end-to-end agent systems, including orchestration logic, tool integrations, memory handling, and execution environments.
- Establish best practices for workflow reliability, including retries, fallbacks, guardrails, and observability of agent behaviour.
- Balance speed and iteration with the need for determinism, debuggability, and user trust in automated systems.
- Drive improvements in how users build, test, and debug AI-powered workflows inside n8n.
- Lead with technical credibility in agent systems
- Bring strong technical depth in LLM integrations, tool use, and workflow orchestration, enabling you to mentor and challenge your team.
- Support architectural decisions around agent frameworks, execution engines, state management, and integration layers.
- Help the team design systems that handle long-running workflows, external APIs, and dynamic decision-making by agents.
- Step into technical details when needed (e.g., prompt design, tool schemas, workflow execution issues) to unblock the team.
- Promote best practices around safety, guardrails, and predictable behaviour in agent-driven systems.
Requirements
Must-haves
- First-line engineering management experience: You’ve led teams delivering meaningful product outcomes, ideally including automation platforms, workflow systems, or AI-powered features.
- Significant experience working with Evaluations & driving results via evals.
- Strong people leadership: You coach engineers effectively and build teams that thrive in ambiguous, fast-evolving technical spaces.
- Comfort with ambiguity and speed: You bring clarity in a world where agent patterns, tooling, and best practices are still emerging.
- Strong software engineering background: You can confidently engage in discussions around distributed systems, APIs, and system design.
- Hands-on when needed: You can dive into workflow logic, integrations, or AI system behaviour to support your team.
- Cross-functional alignment: Experience working closely with Product and Design to deliver end-user-facing builder experiences.
- High-growth SaaS experience: You understand how to scale teams and systems in a fast-moving environment.
- AI/agent exposure: Experience working with LLMs, agents, or automation systems, with an understanding of their strengths, limitations, and failure modes.
Nice-to-haves
- n8n or workflow tooling familiarity: Experience with n8n or similar automation platforms.
- Integration-heavy systems: Background in building or scaling API-driven platforms or extensible systems.
- Deep agent experience: Hands-on work with agent frameworks, tool use, memory systems, or multi-step reasoning workflows.
- Observability & debugging: Experience building tools for inspecting, debugging, and improving complex workflows or AI systems.
- Responsible AI: Awareness of guardrails, failure handling, and safe automation practices in user-facing AI systems.