Senior Engineering Manager - Test Systems & Tooling

Role details

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 Temporal’s reliability is fundamental to why customers choose us—and as our customers run increasingly critical workloads on the platform, our ability to confidently test changes must scale with that responsibility. As a Senior Engineering Manager on the Test Systems & Tooling team, you will lead a team responsible for building the shared systems, environments, and tooling that enable Temporal engineers to validate the platform under production-like and adverse conditions. You’ll help ensure system-level testing gaps don’t fall through organizational boundaries by driving cross-team alignment, clear ownership, and measurable improvements in pre-production confidence. What You'll Do Lead and grow the Test Systems & Tooling team: Hire, coach, and develop engineers building shared testing capabilities used across Engineering. Make production-like testing practical: Improve the ability for engineers to create test environments that resemble production topology, configuration, scale, and behavior—so reproducing issues and validating changes is faster and more reliable. Enable production-representative workload testing: Build or evolve capabilities such as workload replay, realistic workload generation, multi-tenant testing, load testing, and stress testing to surface behaviors that only emerge at scale. Drive failure-mode validation: Establish repeatable ways to test Temporal through real failure conditions (e.g., dependency failures, latency injection, resource exhaustion, degraded-state recovery, and regional failure scenarios). Create shared frameworks and guidance: Provide opinionated testing frameworks, patterns, and tooling that make it easier for product teams to write high-quality tests consistently, with visibility into test health and systemic gaps. Own system-level coverage outcomes: Identify critical system-level scenarios that need explicit coverage, drive them to completion (often through partner teams), and ensure they’re integrated into continuous and/or release validation. Collaborate across org boundaries: Partner closely with Cloud/Infrastructure, Reliability, Release Engineering, and product teams to turn production learnings into stronger pre-production detection. What You'll Bring Experience managing and developing a high-performing engineering team (including direct reports), with strong coaching, feedback, and performance management skills. Strong technical background building or operating reliable distributed systems (or adjacent platform infrastructure) and the judgment to prioritize the failure modes that matter most. Track record delivering internal platforms/tooling adopted by many teams—balancing ergonomics, speed, and long-term maintainability. Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where success depends on aligning stakeholders, clarifying ownership, and driving execution across multiple teams. Ability to define and drive measurable outcomes (adoption, confidence signals, reduced escaped issues, faster incident-to-coverage time), not just ship tooling. Nice to Have Experience with large-scale testing practices: chaos engineering, fault injection, workload replay/shadowing, performance testing, or multi-tenant test strategy. Experience partnering with Release Engineering or CI/CD platform teams to institutionalize validations in pipelines. Familiarity with observability and incident response practices, and translating incident learnings into preventative test coverage. Compensation The estimated pay range for this role is $268,000 - $351,750 depending on experience and location. This role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan. Compensation ranges reflect salary and commission compensation (when applicable) across several geographic markets. Employment offers carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, knowledge, expertise, skillset, market location, and job level assessed during the interview process. Employee benefits and perks below are for full-time employees, part-time or temporary positions are excluded. U.S. Benefits Unlimited PTO, 12 Holidays + 2 Floating Holidays 100% Premiums Coverage for Medical, Dental, and Vision AD&D, LT & ST Disability, and Life Insurance (Standard & Supplemental Available) Empower 401K Plan Additional Perks for Learning & Development, Lifestyle Spending, Home Office Setup, Professional Memberships, WFH Meals, Internet Stipend and more! International Benefits Paid Time Off (PTO) and Benefits outside the United States vary by country, and are issued in partnership with Remote.com . Additionally, Temporal offers perks to all international employees for learning & career development, a lifestyle spending account, home office setup, professional memberships, work-from-home meals, and access to the Calm app for mental wellness. Travel Temporal is a globally distributed, collaborative team that values opportunities for in-person connection. Occasional travel may be required for company events, team offsites, and other meaningful moments that bring us together. Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Temporal Technologies does not discriminate on the basis of race,