Software Engineer II, OSS
Temporal · Seattle, Washington
About this role
**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**, covering areas such as **Matching**, **Applications**, **Foundations**, **task processing**, **quotas & throttling**, **visibility**, developer-facing primitives (e.g., **standalone activities**, **schedules**, **streaming**), and workflow lifecycle improvements (e.g., **Continue-As-New**, **pause**, **reset**). You won’t be expected to cover everything—this is a hands-on role where you’ll learn the system, contribute to new and/or ambiguous projects across the codebase, and help improve **reliability, performance, operability, and developer experience** over time. --- **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 across areas like task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features. - Make thoughtful engineering tradeoffs (developer experience, performance, operability). - Partner with engineers, product managers, cloud teams, and customer-facing teams to deliver scalable solutions. - Improve reliability and operability via tests, instrumentation, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation. - Participate in design discussions and code reviews. - Contribute to developer experience improvements for open source users and enterprise customers. - Share knowledge and help build a collaborative engineering culture. --- **What You’ll Bring** - Experience building and operating production backend systems (distributed systems and concurrency experience preferred). - Strong CS fundamentals (concurrency basics, data structures, debugging). - Production-quality coding experience in **Go, Java,** or another applicable backend language (correctness and maintainability emphasized). - Familiarity with distributed systems concepts (fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, replication, scheduling, performance) and interest in deepening them. - Ability to break down ambiguous problems, ask good questions, and incorporate feedback from code reviews. - Comfort collaborating across teams and communicating progress, risks, and tradeoffs. - Testing practices and an operational mindset (logging, metrics, tracing, on-call empathy) is a plus. - Open source experience is a plus. - Cloud experience (**AWS, Azure, or GCP**) is a plus. - Exposure to **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** - Excited to deepen distributed systems expertise. - Enjoys learning large, complex codebases and thriving in ambiguity. - Takes ownership, follows through, and collaborates well. - Balances technical depth with practical engineering decisions. - No prior Temporal experience required—interest in working on the core of a distributed system used by open source and enterprise customers. --- **Equal Opportunity Employer** Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation, contact your Recruiter.
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