Staff Software Engineer - 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 foundational to our value proposition, and as more customers run mission-critical workloads on Temporal, we need the ability to validate changes under production-like conditions and realistic failure modes before they reach production. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Test Systems & Tooling team, you will lead technical initiatives that make sophisticated system-level testing practical across Engineering—spanning production-representative environments, workload replay/generation, and repeatable failure-mode testing. You’ll build platforms and tooling that enable teams to reproduce and prevent the kinds of issues that only emerge from complex interactions between workload, scale, configuration, and multi-tenant behavior. What You'll Do Build production-like test environments: Design and evolve tooling that makes it easy for engineers to spin up test cells that resemble production topology, configuration, and behavior, in partnership with Cloud/Infrastructure. Enable production-representative workloads: Build capabilities for workload generation, multi-tenant testing, stress/load testing, and (where appropriate) traffic replay or replay-like systems to reproduce production behaviors in controlled environments. Make failure-mode testing repeatable: Create tooling for injecting and validating failure conditions (latency, dependency faults, resource exhaustion, degraded-state recovery, and region-level failure scenarios) so we test them deliberately—not just learn from production. Drive system-level test coverage: Identify high-impact system-level scenarios that are currently hard to test, and implement (or partner with the right teams to implement) repeatable coverage that’s incorporated into continuous and/or release validation. Build shared frameworks and paved paths: Provide opinionated libraries, harnesses, and patterns that make it easier for product teams to write high-quality system and integration tests consistently. Raise the technical bar through leadership: Mentor engineers and influence testing strategy across the org through design docs, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration. Partner across Engineering: Work closely with Reliability and Release Engineering to turn incident learnings into durable pre-production test coverage and to integrate validations into the release pipeline. What You'll Bring Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building and operating production-quality systems (platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, or distributed systems). Demonstrated technical leadership: leading ambiguous, cross-team initiatives; driving alignment; and delivering durable systems that other teams rely on. Experience designing for observability, debuggability, and operational readiness (metrics, logs, tracing, safe rollouts, and failure analysis). Comfort working across organizational boundaries—collaborating with Cloud/Infrastructure, Reliability, Release Engineering, and product teams to land outcomes. Strong written communication skills (design docs, testing strategy proposals, and documentation that scales adoption). Nice to Haves Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, workload replay/shadowing, performance testing, or multi-tenant test strategy. Experience building internal platforms used broadly across an engineering org (paved roads, self-serve environments, shared frameworks). Familiarity with measuring engineering/system outcomes (e.g., signal quality, coverage gaps closed, incident-to-coverage time, adoption). Compensation The estimated pay range for this role is $212,000 - $278,250 depending on experience and location. Additionally, 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 Technol