Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Temporal as a Staff Engineer and design, build, and maintain key components of our backend for highly scalable, multi-tenant services. You will own the custom persistence stack for Temporal Cloud, including a Write Ahead Log, metadata stores, caches, and tiered storage. Responsibilities include designing distributed data systems, ensuring reliability and performance, providing technical leadership, and collaborating with cross-functional teams. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of experience building highly scalable distributed systems, solid computer science fundamentals, experience with concurrent code in Go or Java, and experience with AWS. Temporal offers competitive compensation, equity, and comprehensive benefits, including unlimited PTO, full health insurance coverage, 401k, and various additional perks.

Requirements

• 5 or more years of experience as an "Arranger" and/or "Builder/Enhancer" of highly scalable distributed systems
• Solid computer science fundamentals in distributed systems concepts including multi-threading and concurrency
• Experience writing concurrent code in production with languages like Go or Java or other applicable languages with skill level as "high end of Intermediate" and/or "Advanced" or "Expert" levels
• Experience building and running services on AWS

Responsibilities

• Design & build distributed data systems – craft APIs, schemas, and replication paths that keep petabytes of workflow history durable and query-able. Clearly document design choices and operational knowledge to successfully deploy and run service with those features
• Drive reliability & performance – own SLOs, create chaos-test plans, profile hot paths, and lead incident reviews
• Technical leadership – break down roadmap epics, mentor mid-level engineers, steward design docs through RFC
• Cross-team collaboration – partner with the Server, Cloud, and DX teams to land features end-to-end

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior contributions to Temporal, Cadence, or other workflow engines
• Deep expertise in a storage domain (LSM trees, columnar stores, transactional logs, etc.)
• Operated multi-region, ≥99.99 % uptime services
• Experience working with Open Source Systems
• Experience in building K8s controllers and/or CRDs is a plus

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO, 12 Holidays + 2 Floating Holidays
• 100% Premiums Coverage for Medical, Dental, and Vision
• AD&D, LT & ST Disability, and Life Insurance (Standard & Supplemental Available)
• Empower 401K Plan
• Additional Perks for Learning & Development, Lifestyle Spending, In-Home Office Setup, Professional Memberships, WFH Meals, Internet Stipend and more!
• Paid Time Off (PTO) and Benefits outside the United States vary by country, and are issued in partnership with Remote.com
• Additionally, Temporal offers perks to all international employees for learning & career development, a lifestyle spending account, in-home office setup (in addition to company-issued hardware), professional memberships, work-from-home meals, and access to the Calm app for mental wellness
• $3,600 / Year Work from Home Meals
• $1,500 / Year Career Development & Learning
• $1,200 / Year Lifestyle Spending Account
• $1,000 / Year In-Home Office Setup (In addition to Temporal issued equipment - laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, trackpad, and extension power cable at no cost to you)
• $500 / Year Professional Memberships
• $74 / Month Reimbursement for Internet
• Calm App Subscription for Mental Health & Wellness