Staff Engineer: Distributed Replication Systems

Temporal; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Temporal is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Replication Foundations team in the Cloud Global Services (CGS) organization. You will help define the technical direction for Temporal’s distributed replication systems and lead complex, correctness-critical initiatives across OSS and Temporal Cloud.

You will partner with multiple teams to align OSS replication with customer needs, drive scalability, reliability, and ensure strong operational behavior while mentoring engineers and guiding

Qualifications

• Production distributed systems with a focus on correctness, availability and performance.
• Fundamentals of distributed systems: replication, partitioning, consistency, fault tolerance and failure recovery.
• Experience defining system architecture, protocol behavior, and invariants in evolving problem spaces.
• Proficiency debugging concurrency issues and performance bottlenecks in large-scale systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication to explain complex designs and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and evolve the architecture of Temporal’s OSS replication stack, from problem definition through rollout and operational support.
• Lead design and implementation of replication protocols powering High Availability namespaces, cross-cluster/cross-region replication, and cloud-to-self-hosted migrations.
• Drive scalability and reliability initiatives (multi-cell namespaces, multi-cluster namespaces, load distribution).
• Define and communicate system guarantees including consistency models, ordering, idempotency, failure recovery, and performance.
• Identify risks and shape the technical roadmap for replication across open source and Temporal Cloud.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to align OSS replication foundations with customer and product needs.
• Lead design reviews, raise implementation/testing quality, mentor engineers, and provide technical guidance.
• Lead or contribute to debugging production issues, incident response, and post-mortem improvements.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Go programming

Java

C++

System architecture

Performance optimization

Debugging production issues

Technical mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Go tooling

Job description

Temporal is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Replication Foundations team in the Cloud Global Services (CGS) organization. You will help define the technical direction for Temporal’s distributed replication systems and lead complex, correctness-critical initiatives across OSS and Temporal Cloud.

You will partner with multiple teams to align OSS replication with customer needs, drive scalability, reliability, and ensure strong operational behavior while mentoring engineers and guiding