Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives

Temporal Temporal · Enterprise · United States · Product Management

Staff Product Manager for Temporal's Core Primitives, focusing on developer-facing platform products like Workflows, Activities, and more. This role involves strategy generation, problem framing, driving PRDs, cross-SDK coordination, and customer validation for platform improvements.

What you'd actually do

  1. Generate the area strategy that connects primitives, connectivity, and composition into a coherent thesis - what expands, why, and how investments compound
  2. Frame the problem space and make bets - which primitives need investment, which are mature, and where the next leverage point is
  3. Drive 1-pagers and PRDs for primitive improvements and new capabilities
  4. Own cross-SDK delivery for each primitive - coordinate with SDK teams to ensure consistent behavior across Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, and .NET
  5. Run customer validation - identify who's hitting primitive gaps, gather evidence, and use it to prioritize

Skills

Required

  • Product management experience
  • Platform or infrastructure product experience
  • Developer-facing product experience
  • Strategy generation
  • Problem framing
  • Cross-team coordination
  • Customer validation
  • Technical behavior understanding
  • Data-driven prioritization

Nice to have

  • Experience with workflow engines
  • Orchestration platforms experience
  • Durable execution experience
  • Cross-language or cross-platform products experience
  • Familiarity with Restate, Inngest, Durable Objects, Step Functions
  • Distributed systems building experience

What the JD emphasized

  • 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time on platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing products
  • Track record of generating area-level strategy - framing the problem space, making bets, connecting investments into a thesis. Strong execution on individual features isn't sufficient signal for this role
  • You've defined what a platform area becomes, not just shipped what was on the roadmap
  • You can hold a coherent vision across multiple primitives that ship on different timelines to different language ecosystems
  • You've driven complex cross-team delivery - shipping features across multiple SDKs or client libraries, coordinating without direct authority
  • You can go deep on technical behavior - you understand the difference between a timeout and a cancellation, and why it matters for the developer
  • You're rigorous about customer evidence - you don't prioritize based on intuition when data exists
  • You've partnered with engineering leadership, not just engineering teams - you influence technical direction, not just product requirements