Senior Software Engineer, Open Source Server

Role Description

Temporal is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Open Source Server team. This team builds and maintains the core Temporal server. Its scope is broad, including:

• Matching
• Applications
• Foundations
• Task processing
• Quotas and throttling
• Visibility
• Developer-facing primitives such as standalone activities, schedules, and streaming
• Workflow experience improvements such as Continue-As-New, pause, and reset

This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll collaborate with experienced engineers to design, build, and operate the core of Temporal's distributed systems platform.

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and ship features for the Temporal server.
• Solve distributed systems challenges across areas such as task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features.
• Make thoughtful engineering tradeoffs across developer experience, performance, and operability requirements.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams to build scalable technical solutions.
• Improve the reliability and operability of the server through testing, observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
• Participate in design discussions and code reviews to help maintain a high-quality codebase.
• Contribute to improving the developer experience for both open source users and enterprise customers.
• Mentor junior engineers and share knowledge with teammates.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, scheduling, and performance.
• Solid computer science fundamentals in distributed systems concepts including multi-threading and concurrency.
• Experience writing concurrent code in production with languages like Go or Java or other applicable languages with skill level as "high end of Intermediate" and/or "Advanced" or "Expert" levels.
• Experience building high-scale or performance-sensitive backend services, such as request-serving systems, task queues, scheduling systems, streaming or replication pipelines, rate limiting, sharding, load balancing, workflow engines, or orchestration systems.
• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and operational skills with a focus on reliability and observability.
• Experience designing and building backend APIs or platform services.
• Ability to work collaboratively across engineering teams and contribute to technical discussions.
• Experience with open source software or communities is a plus.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP is a plus.
• Experience with technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, or MySQL is a plus.
• Experience with Kubernetes, CRDs, KEDA, or Argo is a plus.

What Makes You a Good Fit

• You enjoy solving challenging distributed systems problems while keeping the developer experience in mind.
• You like learning large codebases and making meaningful technical contributions over time.
• You take ownership of your work and collaborate well with teammates.
• You enjoy balancing technical depth with practical engineering decisions.
• You don't need prior Temporal experience, but you're excited to work on the core of a distributed system used by a large open source community and enterprise customers.

Compensation

The estimated pay range for this role is $176,000 - $237,600, depending on experience and location. Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO, 12 Holidays + 2 Floating Holidays
• 100% Premiums Coverage for Medical, Dental, and Vision
• AD&D, LT & ST Disability, and Life Insurance (Standard & Supplemental Available)
• Empower 401K Plan
• Additional Perks for Learning & Development, Lifestyle Spending, In-Home Office Setup, Professional Memberships, WFH Meals, Internet Stipend and more!

Travel

Temporal is a globally distributed, collaborative team that values opportunities for in-person connection. Occasional travel may be required for company events, team offsites, and other meaningful moments that bring us together.

Additional Perks

• $3,600 / Year Work from Home Meals
• $1,800 / Year Professional Enrichment (Career Development & Professional Memberships)
• $1,200 / Year Lifestyle Spending Account
• $1,000 / Year In-Home Office Setup (In addition to Temporal issued equipment - laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, trackpad, and extension power cable at no cost to you)
• $74 / Month Reimbursement for Internet
• Calm App Subscription for Mental Health & Wellness