Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundations

About Us

Temporal is an open source programming model that can simplify code, make applications more reliable, and help developers focus on the important things like delivering features faster. We are on a mission to be the reliable foundation of every developer’s toolbox, and are building the team that will make that happen. Our values guide us —they are present in how we show up, make decisions, and work together to make an impact. We’re curious, driven, collaborative, genuine and humble.

Temporal is growing and we are looking for those who share our values, challenge 'standard' thinking, and want to influence our future. If you have a passion for improving the developer experience, building world-class open-source software and communities, and want to be a part of our amazing team, we'd love to hear from you!

Summary

We have an opening to hire a Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundations. Temporal provides a reliable foundation powering AI leaders such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and others. Its adoption is also expanding to users spanning across a broad range of AI applications. These range from agents to data pipelines and everything in between.

The mission of the AI Foundations team is to accelerate Temporal adoption across the entire ecosystem. Our approach combines a deep understanding of use cases with technical principles such as computer systems and software design fundamentals. If you thrive on blending theory and practice, then this is the right team for you. We are an action-oriented group that loves to ship fast and solve customer problems. We also seek thorough technical grounding for our work and invest in systems and practices that foster long-term success.

Agentic development is a huge focus. We maintain a set of agents skills that give Codex, Claude Code, and similar tools a major boost when writing Temporal applications. These are already unblocking a large backlog of projects among our customer base. They also are an extraordinary point of leverage for Temporal’s mission, which has always been about accelerating developers as they build and operate reliable software. Working in this area puts you at the forefront of the agentic coding revolution.

Another major area of investment is our partner ecosystem. We developed a plugin system that makes it easy to add Temporal’s durable execution to popular open source agent frameworks such as Pydantic AI, AI SDK by Vercel, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, and others. Getting these abstractions right involves both creativity and critical trade-off analysis. Many challenges of this flavor remain to be solved. As we make progress, we instill our learnings in our internal AI systems, ensuring that our people are always working to push the frontier.

We await the next AI breakthrough as eagerly as anyone, standing ready to shuffle our short-term priorities at any time. We know, however, that our long-term success and impact comes from attention to technical fundamentals and persistent trends.

Most of Temporal’s work is open source—see for yourself here: https://github.com/temporalio

What You Will Do

• Work as a software engineer
• Maintain and expand a deep understanding of agentic coding
• Design and build agentic coding systems that we can trust to deliver high-quality outputs
• Design and implement Temporal AI SDK features supporting a broad variety of frameworks and libraries.
• Develop a deep understanding of AI application development patterns and techniques, including emerging approaches and architectures.
• Take end-to-end ownership of new features, working with other teams to deliver exceptional reliability and a great developer experience.
• Work with multiple programming languages: Python and TypeScript, Java, Go.
• Serve as a domain expert on AI design patterns, collaborating with field staff to provide best-practices and canonical examples.
• Work directly with our developer community to debug issues that need expert attention and get feedback on Temporal features and APIs.
• Write public technical documentation describing Temporal concepts and APIs.
• Go the extra mile to support a customer in need, on the rare occasion that our teams’ 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 as a Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Devops SWE, or SRE.
• 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 our code to be the same.
• Work behind closed doors. Our work is 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

• 8+ years of professional work experience.
• Experience and passion for harnessing generative AI, particularly for agents and coding.
• A deep understanding of how to use AI to increase quality, not only to increase quantity.
• A sense of taste in code and software development practice. Your approach should be opinionated and thoughtful, but not dogmatic.
• A track record of open source software contributions, including contributions to 3rd party libraries.
• Fluency in multiple programming languages, and an affinity for learning new ones.
• Deep experience with concurrent programming—you should know how to use mutexes, atomics, and other concurrency primitives safely.
• Experience designing APIs and writing documentation for publicly-available libraries or modules.
• Strong technical communication skills—written and verbal—in English.
• BS or MS in Computer Science (or a closely-related degree), or equivalent work experience writing production-grade software.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Temporal’s programming model (e.g. you’ve written an app on Temporal).
• Experience building agents or other AI applications
• Background in machine learning, model training, data science, or machine learning systems.
• Experience contributing to the architecture and design of large-scale distributed systems.
• Graduate degree in Computer Science.