Senior Staff Engineer, Open Source Server

About the role

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, covering areas such as Matching, Applications, Foundations, task processing, quotas and throttling, visibility, developer-facing primitives like standalone activities, schedules, and streaming, and workflow experience improvements like Continue-As-New, pause, and reset.

Responsibilities

• 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 areas such as task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features.
• Make practical tradeoffs across reliability, performance, operability, product needs, and open source usability.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams to turn hard problems into clear technical plans.
• Improve how we build and run the server through better testing, observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
• Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and help the team make good technical decisions.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Strong technical leadership experience, including leading design work, aligning engineers, 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, such as request serving paths, task queues, scheduling systems, streaming or replication pipelines, rate limiting, sharding, load balancing, workflow engines, or orchestration systems.
• Good operational instincts. You care about reliability, observability, debugging, incident response, and making systems easier to run.
• Experience designing APIs, primitives, or platform features that other developers use.
• Experience working with open source systems or communities.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure or GCP experience 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.

Qualifications

• You like working on deep systems problems, but you also care about the people who have to use and operate the system.
• You are comfortable joining a large codebase, building context, and finding the right place to make an impact.
• You do not need to know Temporal already, but you should be excited to work on the core of a distributed system used by a large open source community and enterprise customers.

Benefits

• Compensation range: $260,000 - $325,000 depending on experience and location.
• Participation in Temporal's equity plan.
• 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!
• Paid Time Off (PTO) and Benefits outside the United States vary by country, and are issued in partnership with Remote.com. Additionally, Temporal offers perks to all international employees for learning & career development, a lifestyle spending account, in-home office setup (in addition to company-issued hardware), professional memberships, work-from-home meals, and access to the Calm app for mental wellness.
• 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 - 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.