Senior Software Engineer, Compute (Temporal Cloud)

Temporal; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Temporal Technologies is seeking a senior engineer to build durable compute primitives and autoscaling for Temporal Cloud. You will shape the boundary between server and cloud compute, and own critical paths in task execution with robust operational tooling.

You’ll drive real-world cloud integrations, guardrails, and incident readiness while mentoring peers and influencing cross-team platform changes. Strong Go experience is a plus.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building distributed systems or multi-tenant platform services (design, implementation, and production operations).
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure-mode thinking.
• A record of shipping platform primitives used by other engineers/customers (APIs, control planes, data planes).
• Comfort owning outcomes: SLOs, incident response, and improving on-call quality over time.
• Excellent written communication and crisp tradeoff thinking. (Go experience is a plus; judgment matters most.)

Responsibilities

• Invent: Create new managed compute primitives for Temporal Cloud with clean APIs and cross-provider extensions.
• Invent: Design self-optimizing autoscaling systems that scale worker fleets safely and predictably.
• Invent: Define the Open Source Server Cloud boundary for compute capabilities to keep architecture cohesive.
• Own: Architect, build, and operate services on the hot path of task execution with performance and correctness for customers.
• Own: Deliver real-world cloud integrations (IAM boundaries, secure credentials handling, networking constraints, quotas, failure modes).
• Own: Make operability a feature with SLOs, tracing/metrics, load testing, incident reviews, and hardening.
• Own: Ship end-to-end: API design, rollout strategy, backwards compatibility, long-term maintenance.
• Teach: Raise the bar through design docs, strong reviews, pragmatic technical leadership, mentorship.
• Teach: Lead through influence across teams to land coherent platform changes.

Skills

Distributed systems

Multi-tenant platforms

Concurrency

Performance

Reliability

Failure-mode thinking

APIs

Control planes

Data planes

Go

Tools

Kubernetes controllers

Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)

Job description

ROLE SUMMARY

Temporal powers durable execution for the world’s most demanding AI and enterprise systems. The Compute team at Temporal makes that durability feel effortless by building the managed compute primitives that run workers and other execution systems across Temporal Cloud. We’re solving a hard platform problem: make compute transparent, elastic, safe-by-default, observable, and multi-cloud — without turning customers into infrastructure operators. We build platform primitives that span a variety of execution environments (e.g., serverless-style runtimes, containerized fleets, and customer-controlled deployments). Our work sits at the intersection of control plane + data plane: scaling decisions, isolation boundaries, multi-tenant safety, and production-grade observability. If you’ve built autoscaling systems, multi-tenant platforms, or cloud infrastructure, you’ll find a lot to love here. See the "Compute team" link to read more —> Compute Team https://temporalio.notion.site/Join-Temporal-s-Compute-Team-598b6bca8bf84d3babf3e8e2a22c283c

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Invent

• Create new managed compute primitives that feel first-class in Temporal Cloud: crisp abstractions, clean APIs, and an extension story across compute providers.


• Design self-optimizing autoscaling systems (signals, backstops, debouncing, guardrails) that scale worker fleets safely and predictably.


• Define the Open Source Server Cloud boundary for compute capabilities, keeping the architecture cohesive and maintainable.

Own

• Architect, build, and operate services on the hot path of task execution where performance and correctness are customer-visible.


• Deliver real-world cloud integrations (e.g., customer-account execution): IAM boundaries, secure credentials handling, networking constraints, quotas, and failure modes.


• Make operability a feature: SLOs, tracing/metrics, load and failure testing, incident reviews, and continuous hardening.


• Ship end-to-end: API design, rollout strategy, backwards compatibility, and long-term maintenance.

Teach

• Raise the bar through design docs, strong reviews, pragmatic technical leadership, and mentorship.


• Lead through influence across teams (Server, SDKs, Security, Control Plane) to land coherent platform changes.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• Significant experience building distributed systems or multi-tenant platform services (design, implementation, and production operations).


• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure-mode thinking.


• A record of shipping platform primitives used by other engineers/customers (APIs, control planes, data planes).


• Comfort owning outcomes: SLOs, incident response, and improving on-call quality over time.


• Excellent written communication and crisp tradeoff thinking. (Go experience is a plus; judgment matters most.)

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience building cloud infrastructure platforms.


• Experience with IAM/security boundaries for cross-account execution models.


• Having built Kubernetes controllers / CRDs or heterogeneous worker fleet operations.

Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Temporal Technologies does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We embrace and celebrate differences and diversity.

Temporal is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation, please let your Recruiter know so we can assist.