Staff Software Engineer, Compute (Temporal Cloud)

Overview

Staff Software Engineer on the Compute team at Temporal, building managed compute primitives that run workers and other execution systems across Temporal Cloud.

What you'll do

• Create new managed compute primitives that feel first-class in Temporal Cloud, with crisp abstractions, clean APIs, and an extension story across compute providers.
• Design self-optimizing autoscaling systems (signals, backstops, debouncing, guardrails) that scale worker fleets safely and predictably.
• Define the Open Source Server and Cloud boundary for compute capabilities, keeping the architecture cohesive and maintainable.
• Architect, build, and operate services on the hot path of task execution where performance and correctness are customer-visible.
• Deliver real-world cloud integrations such as customer-account execution, including IAM boundaries, secure credentials handling, networking constraints, quotas, and failure modes.
• Make operability a feature through SLOs, tracing and metrics, load and failure testing, incident reviews, and continuous hardening.
• Ship end-to-end, including API design, rollout strategy, backwards compatibility, and long-term maintenance.
• Raise the bar through design docs, strong reviews, pragmatic technical leadership, and mentorship.
• Lead through influence across teams (Server, SDKs, Security, Control Plane) to land coherent platform changes.

What you'll need

• Significant experience building distributed systems or multi-tenant platform services, including design, implementation, and production operations.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure-mode thinking.
• A record of shipping platform primitives used by other engineers or customers (APIs, control planes, data planes).
• Comfort owning outcomes: SLOs, incident response, and improving on-call quality over time.
• Excellent written communication and crisp trade-off thinking.

Nice to have

• Go experience (judgment matters most).
• Experience building cloud compute platforms spanning physical servers, CPU/GPU resources, virtual machines, container orchestration, and networking.
• Experience extending Kubernetes through custom controllers and CRDs, and operating heterogeneous Kubernetes worker fleets.
• Experience with IAM/security boundaries for cross-account execution models.

Details

• Location: United States (Remote).