Senior Staff Software Engineer - Builder Platform

Temporal Technologies

4d•$208,000 - $341,250

About The Position

Join Temporal’s Builder Platform Team to empower a company of builders with a frictionless, standardized, and governed platform for agents, workflows, and core engineering tools. Temporal operates as customer zero: partnering with internal teams to run real work on the platform, measure its productivity impact, and apply the findings to Temporal products and open-source frameworks. This is a company-level technical leadership role spanning Agents & Workflows, AI Infrastructure, Developer Infrastructure, and Productivity Engineering. The role sets multi-year technical direction, aligns teams around architectural boundaries and standards, and leads cross-functional initiatives from ambiguous opportunity through lasting adoption and measurable impact.

Requirements

Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of setting technical direction and delivering major platform initiatives across multiple engineering teams.
Experience leveraging modern agentic coding tools such as Codex and Claude Code, including defining company-wide best practices and driving adoption.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages commonly used at Temporal, such as Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or Java.
Deep expertise in at least one relevant domain—developer infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or platform engineering—and proficiency across several others.
Experience building and operating internal platforms, developer infrastructure, or agent platforms adopted across a company.
Strong judgment in platform-boundary decisions and tradeoffs involving speed, flexibility, reliability, security, cost, and long-term maintainability.
Demonstrated ability to influence engineering managers, senior individual contributors, Security, Legal, IT, Product, and business stakeholders, and turn ambiguous company objectives into architecture, standards, roadmaps, and coordinated execution.
Experience defining outcome-oriented metrics for developer productivity or AI systems, including adoption, reliability, quality, cost, and cycle time, and using them to steer a portfolio.
Clear written communication, including documentation and technical strategy that enable self-service and align teams.
Experience establishing governance through paved roads rather than documentation or approval processes alone.
Evidence of making technical leaders and teams more effective through mentorship, architectural clarity, and consensus building.

Nice To Haves

Experience building internal agents and operating an agent platform.
Experience building and operating Temporal applications.
Experience defining or implementing AI governance, model-access infrastructure, or agent evaluation systems.
Experience managing GitHub configuration, policy, and workflows at organizational scale.
Familiarity with developer productivity measurement frameworks such as SPACE and DORA metrics.

Responsibilities

Set and communicate a multi-year technical vision for the Builder Platform, translating company strategy into an executable portfolio across Agents & Workflows, AI Infrastructure, Developer Infrastructure, and Productivity Engineering.
Lead the architecture and evolution of the shared Agent Platform used to deploy, run, evaluate, govern, and improve agents and agentic workflows across Temporal.
Establish and operate AI Infrastructure, including LLM and MCP gateways, guardrails, fallback, usage and cost controls, model rollout policies, and SLOs.
Implement AI governance with Security, Legal, and IT, turning policy into practical controls, approved patterns, and auditability.
Architect agents and workflows for engineering and business work, and determine which patterns should become shared platform capabilities versus remain with owning teams.
Own technical strategy for Developer Infrastructure and developer tools, including source control, CI, repository standards, access and ownership models, reusable workflows, and CI reliability and cost.
Partner with leaders across Engineering, Product, Sales, and G&A to identify AI opportunities and prioritize them into a company-wide portfolio.
Standardize adoption of agents and agentic tooling through best practices, paved roads, and enablement, driving organization-wide adoption through influence.
Define architectural and organizational boundaries for centralized, standardized, federated, purchased, or deliberately unbuilt capabilities, balancing speed, flexibility, reliability, security, cost, and maintainability.
Measure platform outcomes including adoption, velocity, reliability, and cost, and use productivity feedback loops to shape the portfolio.
Own the customer-zero strategy: turn internal learnings into validated requirements for Temporal Cloud, SDKs, and the Agent Harness; drive feedback with product leadership; lead an open-source reference architecture; and represent the strategy with customers, partners, and the technical community.
Develop senior technical leaders, align engineering leads and managers, and improve team effectiveness without relying on direct authority.
Participate in the on-call rotation and lead systemic improvements that reduce operational burden, address risks, and improve the internal user experience.