Staff Software Engineer, Compute (Temporal Cloud)

Temporal; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Temporal is seeking a candidate to join the Compute team, delivering durable, managed compute primitives for Temporal Cloud. You will work on autoscaling, multi-tenant safety, observability, and cross-cloud architectures that span serverless runtimes and container fleets.

The role emphasizes performance, correctness, and back-end platform leadership across teams. You will own the hot path of task execution, integrate real-world cloud services, and drive end-to-end API design and maintenance

Qualifications

• Significant experience building distributed systems or multi-tenant platform services.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency, performance, reliability, and failure-mode thinking.
• A track record of shipping platform primitives used by engineers and customers.
• Comfort owning outcomes: SLOs, incident response, and on-call quality.
• Excellent written communication and crisp tradeoff thinking; Go experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Invent new managed compute primitives with clear APIs and extension stories across providers.
• Own self-optimizing autoscaling designs that safely scale worker fleets.
• Define boundaries for compute capabilities and keep architecture cohesive.
• Architect and operate services on the hot path of task execution with performance and correctness.
• Ship end-to-end API design, rollout, backwards compatibility, and long-term maintenance.
• Lead through design reviews and collaboration across Server, SDKs, Security, and Control Plane.

Skills

Distributed systems

Multi-tenant platforms

Go experience

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

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.