Role Summary
Temporal is looking for a Software Engineer II to join the Open Source Server team. This team builds and maintains the core Temporal server. Its scope is broad, including Matching, Applications, Foundations, task processing, quotas and throttling, visibility, developer-facing primitives such as standalone activities, schedules, and streaming, and workflow experience improvements such as Continue-As-New, pause, and reset. We do not expect one person to cover all of these areas. We're looking for an engineer who is excited to learn the system, contribute to new and/or ambiguous projects across the codebase, and help improve the reliability, performance, operability, and developer experience of Temporal over time. This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll collaborate with experienced engineers to design, build, and operate components of Temporal's distributed systems platform while growing your skills in distributed systems engineering.
What You'll Do
• Design, implement, test, and ship well-scoped features and improvements for the Temporal server with support from teammates.
• Work on distributed systems problems in areas such as task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features.
• Make thoughtful engineering tradeoffs with guidance, balancing developer experience, performance, and operability requirements.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams to understand requirements and deliver scalable solutions.
• Improve the reliability and operability of the server by adding tests, instrumentation, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
• Participate in design discussions and code reviews to learn best practices and contribute to a high-quality codebase.
• Contribute to improving the developer experience for open source users and enterprise customers through incremental improvements and bug fixes.
• Share knowledge with teammates and contribute to a collaborative engineering culture.
What You'll Bring
• Experience building and operating production backend systems (distributed systems experience and concurrency experience).
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including concurrency basics, data structures, and debugging.
• Experience writing production-quality code in Go, Java, or another applicable backend language, with an emphasis on correctness and maintainability.
• Familiarity with core distributed systems concepts (e.g., fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, replication, scheduling, performance), with interest in deepening these skills.
• Ability to break down ambiguous problems into smaller tasks, ask good questions, and incorporate feedback from code review.
• Comfort working collaboratively across teams and communicating progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly.
• Experience with testing practices and an operational mindset (logging, metrics, tracing, on-call empathy) is a plus.
• Experience with open source software or communities is a plus.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP is a plus.
• Exposure to technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, or MySQL is a plus.
• Exposure to Kubernetes or related tooling (CRDs, KEDA, Argo) is a plus.
What Makes You a Good Fit
• You're excited to continue building and deepening your distributed systems expertise.
• You enjoy learning large, complex codebases, think critically, thrive in ambiguity, and enjoy solving challenging problems.
• You take ownership of your work, follow through, and collaborate well with teammates.
• You balance technical depth with practical engineering decisions and are comfortable iterating toward better solutions.
• You don't need prior Temporal experience-you're excited to work on the core of a distributed system used by a large open source community and enterprise customers.
