Senior Staff Engineer, Open Source Server

Role Description

Temporal is looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to join the Open Source Server team as a technical lead. This team works on the core Temporal server, with a broad scope 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 technical leadership role where you will:

• Lead the design and implementation of important server features, from proposal through rollout.
• Help set technical direction for one or more areas of the OSS Server team.
• Work on distributed systems problems across various areas.
• Make practical tradeoffs across reliability, performance, operability, product needs, and open source usability.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams.
• Improve server operations through better testing, observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
• Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and help the team make good technical decisions.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Strong technical leadership experience, including leading design work and driving complex projects to completion.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, scheduling, and performance.
• Production experience with Go, Java, or a similar backend language.
• Experience with high-scale or performance-critical systems.
• Good operational instincts focused on reliability, observability, debugging, and incident response.
• Experience designing APIs, primitives, or platform features.
• Experience working with open source systems or communities.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP is a plus.
• Experience with systems such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, or MySQL is a plus.
• Experience with Kubernetes controllers, CRDs, KEDA, or Argo is a plus.

Requirements

• You like working on deep systems problems while caring about the people who use and operate the system.
• You are comfortable joining a large codebase, building context, and finding the right place to make an impact.
• You should be 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 $260,000 - $325,000 depending on experience and location.
• This role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.
• Compensation ranges reflect salary and commission compensation across several geographic markets.

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

• 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)
• $74 / Month Reimbursement for Internet
• Calm App Subscription for Mental Health & Wellness