Senior Staff Engineer, Open Source Server

temporal; United States; On-site; USD 260,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

100% Premiums Coverage for Medical, Dental, and Vision

Work from Home Meals

Professional Membership Support

Job summary

temporal is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to join its Open Source Server team as a technical lead. This role involves leading the design and implementation of critical server features and setting direction for various areas. Ideal candidates will have extensive experience in distributed systems, strong leadership skills, and proficiency in Go or Java.

The position offers a hybrid work model, competitive compensation, and numerous benefits including unlimited PTO and 100% medical premiums coverage.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in production distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency, fault tolerance, and performance.
• Production experience with Go, Java, or similar languages.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of server features.
• Set technical directions for the Open Source Server team.
• Improve server reliability and performance.

Skills

Distributed systems experience

Technical leadership

Go or Java experience

Operational instincts

API and platform feature design

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Elasticsearch

Job description

About Us

Temporal is an open source programming model that can simplify code, make applications more reliable, and help developers focus on the important things like delivering features faster. We are on a mission to be the reliable foundation of every developer’s toolbox, and are building the team that will make that happen.

Our values guide us —they are present in how we show up, make decisions, and work together to make an impact. We’re curious, driven, collaborative, genuine and humble.

Temporal is growing and we are looking for those who share our values, challenge "standard" thinking, and want to influence our future. If you have a passion for improving the developer experience, building world‑class open‑source software and communities, and want to be a part of our amazing team, we'd love to hear from you!

Summary

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. Its scope is broad, including Matching, Applications, Foundations, task processing, quotas and throttling, visibility, developer‑facing primitives such as standalone activities, schedules, and streaming, and workflow experience improvements such as Continue‑As‑New, pause, and reset.

We do not expect one person to cover all of these areas. We are looking for someone who can come in, learn the system, find where they can have the most impact, and lead from there.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role. You will help set direction, design and build important parts of the server, mentor other engineers, and improve the reliability, performance, operability, and developer experience of Temporal.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What You’ll Bring

• 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.

What Makes You a Good Fit

• 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.

Compensation

• The estimated pay range for this role is $260,000 – $325,000 depending on experience and location.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.
• Compensation ranges reflect salary and commission compensation (when applicable) across several geographic markets. Employment offers carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, knowledge, expertise, skillset, market location, and job level assessed during the interview process.

Benefits

• 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!

International Benefits

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

Temporal is a globally distributed, collaborative team that values opportunities for in‑person connection. Occasional travel may be required for company events, team off‑sites, and other meaningful moments that bring us together.

• $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

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.