Staff Software Engineer - Test Systems & Tooling

About Us

Temporal is an open source programming model designed to simplify code, enhance application reliability, and empower developers to deliver features faster. Our mission is to serve as the reliable foundation of every developer’s toolbox and we are assembling a team dedicated to achieving this goal. Our core values guide our actions, emphasizing curiosity, drive, collaboration, genuineness, and humility. We seek individuals passionate about improving the developer experience, building top-tier open-source software, and contributing to our dynamic community.

What You'll Do

• Build production-like test environments: Design and evolve tools to facilitate the creation of test cells that mirror production topology, configuration, and behavior, collaborating with Cloud/Infrastructure teams.
• Enable production-representative workloads: Develop capabilities for workload generation, multi-tenant testing, stress/load testing, and traffic replay or replay-like systems to replicate production behaviors in controlled settings.
• Make failure-mode testing repeatable: Create tools for simulating and validating failure conditions such as latency, dependency faults, resource exhaustion, degraded-state recovery, and regional failures to ensure thorough testing.
• Drive system-level test coverage: Identify critical system-level scenarios that are challenging to test and implement repeatable coverage mechanisms that are integrated into continuous and release validation processes.
• Build shared frameworks and paved paths: Provide standardized libraries, harnesses, and patterns to streamline the writing of high-quality system and integration tests across the organization.
• Raise the technical bar through leadership: Mentor engineers and influence testing strategies across the organization through design documents, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.
• Partner across Engineering: Work closely with Reliability and Release Engineering to leverage incident learnings for pre-production testing and integrate validations into the release pipeline.

What You'll Bring

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building and operating production-quality systems (platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, or distributed systems).
• Demonstrated technical leadership: Leading ambiguous, cross-team initiatives; driving alignment; and delivering durable systems that other teams rely on.
• Experience designing for observability, debuggability, and operational readiness (metrics, logs, tracing, safe rollouts, and failure analysis).
• Comfort working across organizational boundaries—collaborating with Cloud/Infrastructure, Reliability, Release Engineering, and product teams to achieve outcomes.
• Strong written communication skills (design docs, testing strategy proposals, and documentation that scales adoption).

Nice to Haves

• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, workload replay/shadowing, performance testing, or multi-tenant test strategy.
• Experience building internal platforms used broadly across an engineering org (paved roads, self-serve environments, shared frameworks).
• Familiarity with measuring engineering/system outcomes (e.g., signal quality, coverage gaps closed, incident-to-coverage time, adoption).

Compensation

The estimated pay range for this role is $212,000 - $278,250 depending on experience and location. This role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan. Employee benefits and perks include unlimited PTO, 12 holidays plus 2 floating holidays, 100% premium coverage for medical, dental, and vision, AD&D, LT & ST disability, life insurance (standard & supplemental available), Empower 401K plan, and additional perks for learning & development, lifestyle spending, home office setup, professional memberships, work-from-home meals, internet stipend, and more!