Staff Software Engineer, SDK (Language Runtime)

Summary

We have an opening to hire a Staff Software Engineer - SDK (Language Runtime). Our team makes the Temporal SDKs — our SDKs are the primary mechanism through which our customers use Temporal. This is harder than it sounds. SDKs are not thin clients; they act as runtime environments for application code, contain complex internal logic, and coordinate closely with Temporal Server to provide the durable-execution guarantees our customers require.

Most of our work is open source—see for yourself here: github.com/temporalio

What You Will Do

• Take end-to-end ownership of new features, working with others in the SDK and Server teams to deliver exceptional reliability and a great developer experience.
• Design and build Temporal SDKs used by customers to work with Temporal in their programming language of choice.
• Tightly integrate Temporal SDKs with their respective languages, making best use of type systems and language runtimes, to execute application code in a durable, deterministic way.
• Develop features that provide a foundation for the reliable execution of the current wave of agentic AI systems. Be a part of the fundamentals, instead of a part of the trend!
• Work directly with our community to debug issues that need expert attention, and get feedback on Temporal SDK features and APIs.
• Write publicly-readable technical documentation describing Temporal concepts and APIs.
• Go the extra mile to support a customer in need, on the rare occasion that SDK engineering expertise is needed.
• Travel to meet your coworkers for a week once or twice a year.
• Attend the occasional developer conference to talk about how great Temporal is (optional).

What You Won’t Do

• Work in an office (unless you want to, but you’d be by yourself). Temporal is a fully-remote company.
• Commit code that’s poorly-tested or works “most of the time”. Temporal aspires to be “Reliable as Gravity”, and we expect your code to be the same.
• Overwork yourself to meet a deadline. Instead of crunch time, we cut scope.
• Work behind closed doors. The SDKs are open source—that means PRs and comments are open to the public, too.
• Sit in meetings all day. We mostly communicate in writing, and use meetings mainly for status updates and thorny issues that need input from the whole group.
• Wake up to pager alerts. We’re extremely active in supporting our customers and the community, but we don’t do 24/7 on-call.

What You’ll Bring

• Minimum 10 years experience post graduation writing scalable software.
• BS or MS in Computer Science (or a closely-related degree), or equivalent work experience writing production-grade software.
• Fluency in multiple programming languages, and an affinity for learning new ones. We don’t care which, but you should know at least two, and love learning new ones.
• Deep experience with concurrent programming—you should know how to use mutexes, atomics, and other concurrency primitives safely.
• Deep experience with distributed systems—you should know what to do when you can’t rely on mutexes and atomics.
• Experience designing APIs and writing documentation for publicly-available libraries or modules.
• A methodical, detail-oriented approach to your work.
• Strong technical communication skills—written and verbal—in English.
• A deep sense of ownership and personal accountability—you care about the impact of your work, and if something goes wrong, you take responsibility for making it right.
• A proactive approach to managing your work—you’ll need to balance working autonomously vs. working closely with others, and recognize when you need help.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Temporal’s programming model (e.g. you’ve written an app on Temporal).
• Experience writing in Go, Java, Python, .NET, TypeScript, Ruby and/or Rust.
• Experience contributing to open source projects.
• Experience contributing to the architecture and design of large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of language runtimes.