Staff Software Engineer, Test Systems & Tooling

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

Job summary

Temporal is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Test Systems & Tooling to lead initiatives that enable production-like testing across engineering. You will build platforms that reproduce production behavior, enable workload replay, and create repeatable failure-mode tests in controlled environments.

You will drive system-level test coverage, build shared frameworks, and mentor teams to raise testing standards across the org. This role is based in the United States.

Qualifications

• Experience building production-quality systems and developer tooling.
• Demonstrated leadership on cross-team initiatives.
• Strong ability to design for observability and operational readiness.

Responsibilities

• Build production-like test environments and tooling with production topology.
• Enable production-representative workloads and stress testing.
• Create repeatable failure-mode testing and runbooks.
• Drive system-level test coverage and collaborate with reliability teams.
• Mentor engineers and influence testing strategy across teams.

Skills

Production-like testing

System-level testing

Technical leadership

Observability design

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

Role Summary

Temporal's reliability is foundational to our value proposition, and as more customers run mission-critical workloads on Temporal, we need the ability to validate changes under production-like conditions and realistic failure modes before they reach production.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Test Systems & Tooling team, you will lead technical initiatives that make sophisticated system-level testing practical across Engineering—spanning production-representative environments, workload replay/generation, and repeatable failure-mode testing. You'll build platforms and tooling that enable teams to reproduce and prevent the kinds of issues that only emerge from complex interactions between workload, scale, configuration, and multi-tenant behavior.

What You'll Do

• Build production-like test environments: Design and evolve tooling that makes it easy for engineers to spin up test cells that resemble production topology, configuration, and behavior, in partnership with Cloud/Infrastructure.

• Enable production-representative workloads: Build capabilities for workload generation, multi-tenant testing, stress/load testing, and (where appropriate) traffic replay or replay-like systems to reproduce production behaviors in controlled environments.

• Make failure-mode testing repeatable: Create tooling for injecting and validating failure conditions (latency, dependency faults, resource exhaustion, degraded-state recovery, and region-level failure scenarios) so we test them deliberately—not just learn from production.

• Drive system-level test coverage: Identify high-impact system-level scenarios that are currently hard to test, and implement (or partner with the right teams to implement) repeatable coverage that's incorporated into continuous and/or release validation.

• Build shared frameworks and paved paths: Provide opinionated libraries, harnesses, and patterns that make it easier for product teams to write high-quality system and integration tests consistently.

• Raise the technical bar through leadership: Mentor engineers and influence testing strategy across the org through design docs, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.

• Partner across Engineering: Work closely with Reliability and Release Engineering to turn incident learnings into durable pre-production test coverage and to integrate validations into the release pipeline.

What You'll Bring

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building and operating production-quality systems (platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, or distributed systems).

• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading ambiguous, cross-team initiatives; driving alignment; and delivering durable systems that other teams rely on.

• Experience designing for observability, debuggability, and operational readiness (metrics, logs, tracing, safe rollouts, and failure analysis).

• Comfort working across organizational boundaries—collaborating with Cloud/Infrastructure, Reliability, Release Engineering, and product teams to land outcomes.

• Strong written communication skills (design docs, testing strategy proposals, and documentation that scales adoption).

Nice to Haves

• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, workload replay/shadowing, performance testing, or multi-tenant test strategy.

• Experience building internal platforms used broadly across an engineering org (paved roads, self-serve environments, shared frameworks).

• Familiarity with measuring engineering/system outcomes (e.g., signal quality, coverage gaps closed, incident-to-coverage time, adoption).

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.