Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure Foundations

Temporal Technologies

2d • $169,600 - $278,250

About The Position

Infrastructure Foundations builds and operates the multi-cloud platform underneath Temporal Cloud, unifying AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The team owns the systems that provision, manage, and safely change every cell. It is developing Kubernetes-based infrastructure platforms designed to support substantially greater scale.

The Staff Software Engineer will design and build the next version of this platform, owning a significant multi-component system from its APIs to the modeling, change, and recovery of infrastructure state. The role coordinates engineers building different parts of the system while remaining hands-on in the code, developing the capability roadmap with the engineering manager, leading design reviews, and guiding the response to major incidents.

The work includes a platform transformation involving high availability and disaster recovery for control infrastructure, a declarative model for the platform, and a deployment control plane, all while the live platform continues to operate. Temporal uses its own workflow technology to run cell creation, component deployment, and cloud provisioning. The platform supports teams across the company, so its abstractions, standards, and operational dependability influence how those teams deliver software.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of software-building experience, including significant experience designing and operating distributed infrastructure in production.
• Production infrastructure experience on at least two of AWS, GCP, and Azure, including building, operationalizing, and scaling Kubernetes-based platforms across them.
• Deep Kubernetes knowledge, including scheduling, controllers and reconciliation, resource management, isolation, and upgrade safety.
• A record of designing and building a significant multi-component system and coordinating engineers to deliver it; ideally, this includes a substantial infrastructure transition while production remained operational.
• Proficiency across a diverse set of technologies and strong coding skills in Go or another systems language; the role requires writing meaningful code.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex systems, make tradeoffs explicit, and build alignment with engineering and leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ability to design reusable multi-cloud abstractions that account for provider differences and remain secure, observable, and maintainable.
• Sound judgment in Kubernetes architecture and operations, especially recovery under failure.
• Good system-level judgment in ambiguous situations, balancing foundational work, customer needs, and unplanned operational demands.
• Ability to raise engineering standards through design and code reviews, coaching, and clear technical writing.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building and operating infrastructure across all three providers—AWS, GCP, and Azure—especially onboarding a new provider to an existing platform.
• Experience building Kubernetes controllers and operators, including cloud resource controllers such as Crossplane or AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK).
• Upstream open-source contributions or maintainer experience in Kubernetes, CNCF, or similar infrastructure projects; conference talks are a bonus.
• Experience with deployment control planes, progressive delivery, dependency-aware rollouts, and safe migrations of production infrastructure.
• Experience automating lifecycle management, such as patching and upgrades, for cloud-native software across a large fleet.
• Experience with infrastructure services in Go and durable workflow orchestration using Temporal.

Responsibilities

• Design multi-cloud abstractions that unify AWS, GCP, and Azure while accounting for differences in IAM, networking, quotas, and failure modes, and establish how new regions and providers integrate.
• Design and build a significant multi-component platform end to end, coordinate the engineers working on its components, and make system-level tradeoffs explicit.
• Define how platform components are described, versioned, and reconciled across Kubernetes workloads and supporting cloud resources, including reproducible environments, drift visibility, and safe reconciliation.
• Design a deployment control plane with shared inventory, dependency awareness, rollout sequencing, and approvals, while integrating with deployment execution frameworks.
• Build reliability into designs through bounded blast radius, progressive rollouts, observability, load and failure testing, and recovery practices.
• Lead response to difficult incidents and incorporate lessons learned into the platform.
• Develop the capability roadmap with the engineering manager, break large initiatives into clear pieces, evaluate requests from other teams, and weigh technical and business risks.
• Define development processes and operational practices; coach Senior engineers, lead design reviews, review critical pull requests, maintain engineering standards, and help hire engineers.
• Collaborate with Traffic, Control Plane, Developer Productivity, Security, and service owners; communicate designs, influence decisions, support adoption, and own compatibility and migration as the platform evolves.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior