Role SummaryTemporal competes with products, internal systems, familiar habits, and the decision to do nothing. Customers may compare it with cloud workflow services, orchestration frameworks, job queues, databases, AI agent tools, or a platform they built themselves. We need to know which alternatives enter a deal, why Temporal wins or loses, and which differences matter to the customer.
We are looking for a Senior Staff Product Marketing Engineer to focus on competitive benchmarking and positioning and message. You will combine win-loss analysis, field evidence, pricing research, hands-on product evaluation, and reproducible benchmarks. You will use that evidence to improve positioning, help the field compete, and recommend changes to Product, Engineering, and company leadership.
This is a company-wide role. You will decide what we track, how claims are verified, how findings reach the field, and which issues require an executive decision. You will build the program rather than inherit one.
What You Will Do- Co-build Temporal's competitive intelligence program. Focus on benchmarking and thought leadership content and sales support.
- Install, configure, and use competing products and adjacent technologies. Understand their architecture, developer experience, operational model, strengths, limits, pricing, and packaging.
- Design and run fair, reproducible benchmarks and technical evaluations. Document the method, assumptions, environment, results, and limitations so others can trust the evidence.
- Turn competitive evidence into positioning and reusable material for the field, including technical battlecards, comparison guides, objection handling, demos, internal briefings, launch input, and public technical content where appropriate.
- Partner with the Solutions and GTM Director to triage recurring technical questions from Sales and Solutions Architecture. Determine whether the issue is a competitive claim, an architecture pattern, a product gap, or a one-off request, then define an answer the field can reuse.
- Respond quickly to major competitor launches, product claims, pricing changes, market shifts, and high-stakes opportunities. Join selected deals when direct technical work can clarify the decision, then turn the answer into guidance the field can reuse. This role is not assigned presales capacity.
- Build trusted relationships across Sales, Solutions Architecture, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering. Gather intelligence through deal reviews, CRM, field submissions, competitor releases, pricing changes, community activity, and market research.
- Provide deal support to key deals and turn those insights into thought leadership content.
- Publish a monthly update for Product Marketing, Product, Engineering, Sales, and Solutions Architecture. Lead a quarterly executive review covering what changed, where Temporal is strong or exposed, and what Product or GTM should do next. Track each recommendation until it is accepted, rejected, or assigned.
- Set a high evidence standard. State what we know, how we know it, where the comparison depends on workload or configuration, and where evidence is incomplete.
- Partner with Enablement to turn competitive intelligence into training and field guidance. Measure coverage, freshness, response time, field usage, field confidence, competitive deal patterns, and influence on Product and GTM decisions.
- Take on adjacent technical work when priorities shift, such as a launch, reference implementation, emerging competitor, or repeated customer problem.
What You Will Bring- A record of building or substantially improving a competitive intelligence program for a technical product. Your background may be in technical product marketing, solutions architecture, sales engineering, customer engineering, platform engineering, or a similar role. The program included win-loss analysis, technical evaluation, executive communication, product recommendations, and field adoption.
- Hands-on knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, application architecture, and the operational tradeoffs involved in running production software.
- The ability to deploy and evaluate unfamiliar technology, read source code and technical documentation, build a test harness, and troubleshoot results.
- Proficiency in these languages such as Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, C#, or PHP, plus comfort with containers, cloud environments, and automation tools.
- Experience with performance or reliability testing and an understanding of latency, throughput, CPU, memory, storage, network, failure modes, and cost.
- Clear writing, sound judgment, and confidence in the room. You can brief executives, guide the field through a contested deal, and defend the evidence with senior Product and Engineering leaders.
- Intellectual honesty and strong judgment. You do not cherry-pick results or repeat a claim that cannot be supported.
- Strong competitive positioning judgment. You can separate evidence from field folklore, focus the comparison on what matters to the customer, and state the tradeoffs honestly.
- Independent execution across multiple workstreams and the ability to redirect quickly when a new competitor or customer needs matters more.
- Have written meaty technical white papers and deliver them at key conferences.
Nice to Have- Experience with workflow engines, durable execution, event-driven systems, cloud workflow services, job systems, or AI agent frameworks.
- Experience publishing technical benchmarks, comparison content, white papers, or open-source reference projects.
What Success Looks Like After One Year- Temporal has a trusted competitive repository, opportunity taxonomy, win-rate baseline, monthly update, and quarterly executive review.
- Competitive win rate improves against priority alternatives, including build-it-yourself, while losses to status quo or no decision decline.
- Product, Engineering, and GTM act on documented recommendations tied to competitive strengths, customer needs, and product or market gaps.
- The field uses current guidance in competitive opportunities, priority deal support resolves hard technical objections, and the program scales without depending on you to join every deal.
