ABOUT n8n
- n8n is an open workflow orchestration platform built for the AI era, giving technical teams the freedom of code with the speed of no-code, backed by 500+ integrations and an active builder community.
- Founded in 2019, the company has grown to a team of over 260 across Europe and the US, with its centre of gravity in Berlin.
- Milestones so far: a community of more than 650,000 active developers and builders; 190K+ GitHub stars, placing n8n among the world's Top 40 most popular projects; backing from top investors — from Sequoia's first German seed to SAP's recent strategic investment — at a $5.2bn valuation.
- Applicants are encouraged to try n8n out, technical or not, and share a screenshot of their first workflow.
ABOUT THE ROLE
- More than 80% of workflows built on n8n today involve AI agents, and the platform is deliberately expanding from deeply technical developers toward a broader set of builders.
- The central design challenge is keeping power users happy while dramatically lowering the floor for newcomers.
- This is a foundational hire with a real mandate and direct executive partnership.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own the quality bar:
- Set a clear, consistent quality bar the team can orient around, so great work becomes the natural output of how the team designs together.
- Build review processes and critique rituals that give the team a shared language for quality and confidence in craft decisions.
- Evolve the design system and QA practices so the bar rises as the team grows.
- Lower n8n's historically steep learning curve for new users without losing the power experienced builders value.
Drive design's strategic influence:
- Shape product strategy rather than respond to it; bring design thinking into roadmap conversations and surface user problems early.
- Help lead n8n's expansion toward a broader, less technical audience.
- Build relationships with Product, Engineering, and leadership where design is a genuine thought partner at every stage.
Build and grow the team:
- Lead a team of around 14 designers: 2 Design Leads each working with roughly 6 ICs, plus Design Engineering and UX Research, with more hires ahead.
- Shape team structure, career framework, and progression paths.
- Create a culture of high standards and honest feedback.
- Own hiring and headcount planning for the department.
Build research into decision-making:
- Establish a pragmatic, continuous research practice from the ground up, including the first dedicated UX research hires.
- Make customer insight, product data, and community feedback live inputs to product decisions.
- Connect research to activation, adoption, retention, and new-user onboarding.
Help the team work in new ways:
- Champion practical AI adoption across the design org — prototyping, research synthesis, design QA, and workflow efficiency.
- Keep the team current as AI tools, patterns, and expectations evolve.
- Model a thoughtful, adaptive working style.
REQUIREMENTS
Must-haves:
- Product design leadership: experience managing managers, coaching senior designers, and building design teams that improve craft and business outcomes, including making hard performance calls.
- Complex product systems experience: design leadership across complex or developer-facing products.
- Craft authority: ability to identify great work, explain why it's great, and hold the line on standards.
- Strategic influence: a track record of making design a co-equal in product conversations and driving decisions.
- Structured problem-solving under ambiguity: able to create a plan and move forward without a map.
- AI-era product judgment: understanding of the AI, automation, or adjacent tooling landscape and how to turn emerging patterns into trustworthy product experiences.
- Research literacy: ability to build research into product development so insight shapes how teams decide.
- Data-informed decision making: use of product analytics, research, and customer evidence over taste alone.
- Org design and performance management: designing team structures, defining career paths, and handling difficult performance conversations.
Nice-to-haves:
- Open-source, fair-code, community-led, or builder-driven product experience.
- Design engineering credibility, with enough front-end fluency to partner on design system adoption and implementation quality.
- Experience building design rituals, critique, QA, and collaboration practices across distributed teams and time zones.
- Growth surface experience: activation, onboarding, templates, time-to-value, or product-led growth.
- Open to an exceptional Design Manager ready for a first Head-level role.
BENEFITS
- Competitive compensation and equity ownership in n8n.
- Work/life balance: Europe — 30 vacation days plus public holidays; US — 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays.
- Health and wellness: Europe — benefits per local country norms; US — multiple low-premium, low-deductible medical plans for individuals and families, a no-cost premium HDHP option with a pre-seeded HSA, plus dental and vision.
- Future planning: Europe — pension contributions per local norms; US — 401(k) with a 4% employer match.
- Financial security (US): company-paid short-term and long-term disability insurance, plus life insurance.
- Career growth: €1K (or equivalent) per year for courses, books, events, or coaching.
- A passionate team with regular hackathons.
- Remote-first across Europe, with regular off-sites; some roles, such as US sales, are hybrid.
- Giving back: $100 per month to support open source projects of your choice.
- Transparency across what everyone is working on and how the company is doing.
