Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives

Temporal; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Temporal is seeking a Staff Product Manager for Core Primitives to own strategy and roadmap, ensuring long-running work is modeled cleanly and production risk is reduced for developers. You will align with portfolio leads and collaborate with engineering, SDKs, and API teams to translate strategy into coherent platform behavior.

In this role, you will define developer experience goals, measure success, and shape the external narrative with documentation and examples, driving adoption across

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product management experience on platform/infrastructure or developer tools.
• Ability to turn ambiguous technical domains into clear strategy, roadmap, and success measures.
• Strong fluency in distributed systems, workflows, event-driven architectures, APIs/SDKs or platform abstractions.
• Ability to reason about API semantics, failure modes, state management, reliability, scalability, and cost tradeoffs.
• High standards for developer experience across APIs, SDKs, docs, onboarding, and production workflows.
• Track record shipping technical products with engineering, then measuring adoption and iterating.
• Ability to translate workload patterns (including AI agent/workflow/tool calls) into platform requirements for primitives, APIs, SDKs, and integrations.
• Ability to balance open-source developer experience, Cloud adoption, and enterprise production needs.
• Strong product storytelling for technical audiences, including strategy and launch narratives.

Responsibilities

• Own the product strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter.
• Translate signals from customers, field, and open-source communities into platform bets.
• Partner with engineering to ship core behavior improvements across server, SDKs, and APIs.
• Define developer experience goals and success metrics before investments, then validate and iterate.
• Set clear product boundaries and success criteria for internal teams and external users.
• Shape external narrative through positioning, launch narratives, documentation, examples, and field collaboration.
• Ship improvements with documentation, migration guidance, and launch support for adoption.

Skills

Strategy

Roadmap planning

Platform products

APIs/SDKs

Developer experience

Cross-functional leadership

Ship and measure

Job description

ROLE SUMMARY

Customers use Temporal’s core primitives to build critical systems, but too much of the experience still depends on custom patterns, deep Temporal expertise, and careful operational work.

We’re hiring a Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives, to own strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter. This role is not about shipping isolated features. It is about delivering the capabilities and developer experience that make it easier to model long-running work, coordinate across systems, handle failure, and operate production workloads with Temporal.

You’ll partner with the product portfolio lead to align your charter with broader platform priorities, and with engineering and SDK leads to turn strategy into coherent behavior across Temporal’s server, APIs, SDKs, and Cloud experience.

In the first year, success means Core Primitives has a clear strategy, prioritized roadmap, and shipped improvements that reduce the custom patterns, operational burden, and production risk developers face when building with Temporal.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• - Own the product strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter
• - Translate customer, field, and open-source community signals into platform bets, deciding when to improve an existing primitive, introduce a new abstraction, change SDK/API behavior, build an integration, improve guidance, or create a more complete product experience
• - Partner deeply with engineering to ship core behavior improvements across server, SDKs, and APIs, making Temporal easier to model with, operate, and trust in production
• - Define developer experience goals and success metrics before major investments, then validate, measure, and iterate with technical users
• - Set clear product boundaries and success criteria so developers, internal teams, and adjacent product areas know how Core Primitives should be used and extended
• - Shape the external story for your area through positioning, launch narratives, documentation, examples, and close partnership with Developer Relations, Marketing, and field teams
• - Ship improvements with the documentation, examples, migration guidance, and launch support needed for adoption

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• - 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time on platform, infrastructure, developer tools, or other technical products
• - Experience turning ambiguous technical domains into clear strategy, roadmap, success measures, and shipped outcomes
• - Strong technical fluency in distributed systems, workflow or orchestration systems, event-driven architectures, APIs/SDKs, or comparable platform abstractions
• - Ability to reason about API semantics, failure modes, state management, reliability, scalability, and cost tradeoffs
• - High standards for developer experience across APIs, SDKs, documentation, examples, onboarding paths, and production workflows
• - Track record shipping technical products with engineering, then measuring adoption, learning from users, and iterating
• - Ability to translate emerging workload patterns, including AI agents and tool calling, into platform requirements for primitives, APIs, SDKs, and integrations
• - Ability to balance open-source developer experience, Cloud adoption, and enterprise production needs
• - Strong product storytelling for technical audiences, including strategy, launch narratives, tradeoffs, and developer-facing guidance

NICE TO HAVE

• - Experience with workflow engines, durable execution, job queues, data pipelines, scheduling systems, or event-driven platforms
• - Experience building products across multiple programming languages, SDKs, or platform surfaces
• - Experience with AI agent platforms, tool calling, or durable execution for AI workloads
• - Hands-on engineering experience or meaningful experience building with infrastructure products

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.