Senior Open Source Server Engineer - Core Systems

Temporal; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Temporal is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Open Source Server team, helping build and maintain the core Temporal server. The role spans distributed systems challenges across matching, scheduling, visibility, and workflow lifecycle features, with a focus on reliability, performance, and developer experience.

You'll collaborate with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing groups to design, implement, and operate scalable backend services, while mentoring

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, scheduling, and performance.
• Solid computer science fundamentals in distributed systems concepts including multi-threading and concurrency.
• Experience writing concurrent code in Go or Java.
• Experience building high-scale or performance-sensitive backend services, such as request-serving systems, task queues, scheduling systems, streaming or replication pipelines, rate limiting, sharding, load balancing, workflow engines, or orchestration systems.
• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and operational skills with a focus on reliability and observability.
• Experience designing and building backend APIs or platform services.
• Ability to work collaboratively across engineering teams and contribute to technical discussions.
• Experience with open source software or communities is a plus.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP is a plus.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, or MySQL is a plus.
• Experience with Kubernetes, CRDs, KEDA, or Argo is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and ship features for the Temporal server.
• Solve distributed systems challenges across areas such as task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features.
• Make thoughtful engineering tradeoffs across developer experience, performance, and operability requirements.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams to build scalable technical solutions.
• Improve the reliability and operability of the server through testing, observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
• Participate in design discussions and code reviews to help maintain a high-quality codebase.
• Contribute to improving the developer experience for open source users and enterprise customers.
• Mentor junior engineers and share knowledge with teammates.

Skills

Distributed systems

Concurrency

Fault tolerance

Go

Java

Backend APIs

Open source experience

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Performance

Observability

Tools

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

ClickHouse

Cassandra

PostgreSQL

MySQL

KEDA

Argo

CRDs

Job description

Temporal is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Open Source Server team, helping build and maintain the core Temporal server. The role spans distributed systems challenges across matching, scheduling, visibility, and workflow lifecycle features, with a focus on reliability, performance, and developer experience.

You'll collaborate with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing groups to design, implement, and operate scalable backend services, while mentoring