n8n LeadArchitect

n8n Lead/Architect (8-10 Years Experience with 3-4 years in n8n)

San Diego CA (5 Days work from office)

Summary

Were looking for a hands-on n8n expert with 3 4 years of core experience in designing solutioning building deploying and maintaining production-grade workflows using n8n. Should have extensive knowledge of automation of cross-system processes integrate APIs and SaaS platforms create custom nodes and establish observability and governance for scalable secure automations. Youll collaborate with product owners SMEs and platform teams to deliver business outcomes with high reliability and low operational overhead.

Responsibilities

• Design Solution & Build Workflows: Develop modular reusable n8n workflows to automate business processes (event-driven and scheduled).
• Lead 2-3 n8n developers including troubleshooting
• Integration Engineering: Connect to REST/GraphQL APIs webhooks OAuth2/JWT auth and common SaaS apps (e.g. Microsoft 365 Slack Jira ServiceNow Salesforce HubSpot).
• Custom n8n Nodes: Design Build and maintain custom nodes (TypeScript/JavaScript) when native nodes dont meet requirements.
• Data Handling: Transform enrich and validate data (JSON XML CSV); implement schema validation and error handling.
• Deployment & CI/CD: Package and deploy n8n via Docker configure environment variables/secrets and integrate with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions Azure DevOps GitLab CI).
• Security & Compliance: Enforce least privilege secrets management (e.g. Vault n8n credentials) input sanitization PII handling and audit logging.
• Monitoring & Observability: Configure health checks log aggregation (e.g. ELK Datadog) and metrics (throughput latency failure rates).
• Documentation & Enablement: Produce workflow diagrams runbooks and versioned documentation; conduct knowledge transfer to ops and business users.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with business owners to refine requirements; deliver PoCs and then productionize with SLAs.
• Governance: Adhere to automation standards naming conventions version control and change-management procedures.

Must-Have Skills

• Core n8n Expertise 8 10 Years Experience with 3-4 years in n8n:
  • Design and Building complex multi-branch workflows and sub-workflows
  • Webhooks triggers and event-driven automations
  • n8n credentials variables binary data and data passing
  • Error handling try/catch patterns and workflow-level fallbacks
• Programming: Strong JavaScript/TypeScript for functions expressions and custom nodes.
• Enhance workflows with AI agents by leveraging LLMs for intelligent task automation.
• Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases.
• API Integration: REST/GraphQL pagination rate-limiting authentication (OAuth2 API keys JWT) and API contract testing.
• DevOps: Docker-based deployments environment promotion (dev/test/prod) CI/CD version control (Git) and configuration-as-code.
• Data & Messaging: JSON manipulation queues/pub-sub (e.g. RabbitMQ Kafka SQS) and webhook architectures.
• Security: Secrets management token lifecycle signature validation (HMAC) and secure-by-design patterns.
• Testing & Quality: Unit tests for custom nodes workflow test harnesses and regression testing approach.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with Microsoft 365/Teams/SharePoint ServiceNow Salesforce Jira/Confluence integrations.
• Knowledge of RPA (e.g. Power Automate Desktop UiPath) and when to use n8n vs RPA vs iPaaS.
• SSO/Identity: Azure AD SAML SCIM; enterprise networking basics (proxies firewalls).