Senior Staff Software Engineer - Builder Platform

About the role

Role Summary

Join our Builder Platform Team as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Our mission is to empower a company of builders by delivering a frictionless, standardized, and governed platform for agents, workflows, and core engineering tools. We operate Temporal as customer zero: we partner directly with teams across the company to run their real work on the platform, measure the productivity it unlocks, and feed what we learn back into Temporal’s products and open-source frameworks our customers can adopt.

This is a company-level technical leadership role spanning Agents & Workflows, AI Infrastructure, Developer Infrastructure, and Productivity Engineering. You will set the multi-year technical direction for the platform, align teams around clear architectural boundaries and standards, and lead major cross-functional initiatives from ambiguous opportunity through durable adoption and measurable impact.

What You’ll Do

Set and communicate a multi-year technical vision for the Builder Platform, translating company strategy into an executable portfolio across Agents & Workflows, AI Infrastructure, Developer Infrastructure, and Productivity Engineering.

Lead the architecture and evolution of our Agent Platform, the shared foundation teams across Temporal use to deploy, run, evaluate, govern, and improve their agents and agentic workflows.

Establish and operate our AI Infrastructure, the LLM and MCP gateways every agent and workflow at Temporal runs through, with guardrails, fallback, usage and cost controls, model rollout policies, and clear SLOs.

Implement AI Governance in partnership with Security, Legal, and IT, turning policy into practical controls, approved patterns, and auditability without creating unnecessary barriers.

Architect the agents and workflows that carry engineering work from issue to production and business work from trigger to outcome, and decide which patterns graduate into shared platform capabilities and which stay with the teams that own them.

Own the technical strategy for our Developer Infrastructure (Source Control and CI) and developer tools, including repository standards, access and ownership models, reusable workflows, and CI reliability and cost.

Partner with leaders across Engineering, Product, Sales, and G&A to identify where AI can accelerate work and improve outcomes, and prioritize those opportunities into a company-wide portfolio.

Standardize how Temporal adopts agents and agentic tooling (best practices, paved roads, and enablement), driving adoption across the organization through influence rather than mandate.

Define clear architectural and organizational boundaries across the platform (what is centralized, standardized as a paved road, federated to teams, purchased, or deliberately not built) and make the hard tradeoffs among speed, flexibility, reliability, security, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Measure the platform on outcomes (adoption, velocity, reliability, and cost), with feedback loops that quantify the productivity it unlocks and shape the portfolio.

Own our customer-zero strategy: turn what we learn into validated requirements for Temporal Cloud, the SDKs, and our Agent Harness, drive the feedback loop with product leadership, lead our open-source reference architecture for customer platform teams, and represent the strategy with customers, partners, and the broader technical community.

Develop senior technical leaders, create alignment among engineering leads and managers, and make teams more effective without relying on direct authority.

Participate in on-call rotation while leading systemic improvements that reduce operational burden, address risks before they become company-wide problems, and improve the internal user experience.

What You’ll Bring

Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of setting technical direction and delivering major platform initiatives across multiple engineering teams.

Experience leveraging modern agentic coding tools such as Codex and Claude Code, including defining company-wide best practices and driving adoption across the organization.

Proficiency in one or more programming languages commonly used at Temporal, such as Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or Java, with deep expertise in at least one relevant domain (developer infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or platform engineering) and proficiency across several others.

Experience building and operating internal platforms, developer infrastructure, or agent platforms adopted across a company.

Strong judgment in platform-boundary decisions (what to centralize, federate, standardize, buy, or deliberately avoid building) and in tradeoffs among speed, flexibility, reliability, security, cost, and long-term maintainability.

Demonstrated ability to influence engineering managers, senior individual contributors, Security, Legal, IT, Product, and business stakeholders, and to turn ambiguous company objectives into architecture, standards, roadmaps, and coordinated execution.

Experience defining outcome-oriented metrics for developer productivity or AI systems (adoption, reliability, quality, cost, and cycle time) and using them to steer a portfolio.

Clear written communication, including documentation and technical strategy that enable self-service and align teams across the company.

Experience establishing governance through paved roads rather than documentation or approval processes alone.

Evidence of making other technical leaders and teams more effective through mentorship, architectural clarity, and consensus building.

Nice to Haves

Experience building internal agents and operating an agent platform.

Experience building and operating Temporal applications.

Experience defining or implementing AI governance, model-access infrastructure, or agent evaluation systems.

Experience managing GitHub configuration, policy, and workflows at organizational scale

Familiarity with developer productivity measurement frameworks such as SPACE and DORA metrics.

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.