Staff Software Engineer, Compute (Temporal Cloud)

Temporal Technologies

3d • $169,600 - $273,920

About The Position

The Staff Software Engineer will work on Temporal’s Compute team, building managed compute primitives that run workers and other execution systems across Temporal Cloud. The team aims to make compute transparent, elastic, safe by default, observable, and multi-cloud, across execution environments such as serverless-style runtimes, containerized fleets, and customer-controlled deployments. The work spans control-plane and data-plane concerns, including scaling decisions, isolation boundaries, multi-tenant safety, and production-grade observability.

The role involves creating compute primitives and APIs, designing autoscaling systems, and defining the boundary between the Open Source Server and Cloud compute capabilities. The engineer will architect, build, and operate services on the task-execution hot path; deliver cloud integrations such as customer-account execution; and own operability, end-to-end delivery, and long-term maintenance. The role also includes technical leadership through design documents, reviews, mentorship, and cross-team collaboration.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

• Experience building cloud infrastructure compute platforms.
• Experience with IAM or security boundaries for cross-account execution models.
• Experience building Kubernetes controllers or CRDs, or operating heterogeneous worker fleets.
• Go experience.

Responsibilities

• Create managed compute primitives for Temporal Cloud, including clear abstractions, APIs, and an extension story across compute providers.
• Design self-optimizing autoscaling systems with signals, backstops, debouncing, and guardrails to scale worker fleets safely and predictably.
• Define the Open Source Server and Cloud boundary for compute capabilities.
• Architect, build, and operate services on the task-execution hot path, where performance and correctness are customer-visible.
• Deliver cloud integrations such as customer-account execution, addressing IAM boundaries, secure credential handling, networking constraints, quotas, and failure modes.
• Improve operability through SLOs, tracing and metrics, load and failure testing, incident reviews, and continuous hardening.
• Ship work end to end, including API design, rollout strategy, backwards compatibility, and long-term maintenance.
• Provide technical leadership through design documents, strong reviews, and mentorship.
• Lead through influence across Server, SDKs, Security, and Control Plane teams to deliver coherent platform changes.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed