Senior Software Engineer, Compute (temporal Cloud)

Temporal · Enterprise · United States · Engineering

This role is for a Senior Software Engineer on the Compute team at Temporal, focusing on building managed compute primitives for Temporal Cloud. The team's mission is to make compute transparent, elastic, safe, observable, and multi-cloud without requiring customers to be infrastructure operators. The role involves inventing new primitives, designing autoscaling systems, defining OS Server-Cloud boundaries, owning services on the hot path of task execution, delivering cloud integrations, ensuring operability through SLOs and observability, and shipping end-to-end features. The role also involves technical leadership and mentorship.

What you'd actually do

  1. Create new managed compute primitives that feel first-class in Temporal Cloud: crisp abstractions, clean APIs, and an extension story across compute providers.
  2. Design self-optimizing autoscaling systems (signals, backstops, debouncing, guardrails) that scale worker fleets safely and predictably.
  3. Define the Open Source Server ↔ Cloud boundary for compute capabilities, keeping the architecture cohesive and maintainable.
  4. Architect, build, and operate services on the hot path of task execution where performance and correctness are customer-visible.
  5. Deliver real-world cloud integrations (e.g., customer-account execution): IAM boundaries, secure credentials handling, networking constraints, quotas, and failure modes.

Skills

Required

  • 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.

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.
  • Go experience

What the JD emphasized

  • hard platform problem
  • customer-visible
  • production operations
  • production-grade observability
  • customer-visible
  • production operations
  • production operations
  • production operations