Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives

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!

About the role

Customers use Temporal’s core primitives to build critical systems, but too much of the experience still depends on custom patterns, deep Temporal expertise, and careful operational work.

We’re hiring a Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives, to own strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter. This role is not about shipping isolated features. It is about delivering the capabilities and developer experience that make it easier to model long-running work, coordinate across systems, handle failure, and operate production workloads with Temporal.

You’ll partner with the product portfolio lead to align your charter with broader platform priorities, and with engineering and SDK leads to turn strategy into coherent behavior across Temporal’s server, APIs, SDKs, and Cloud experience.

In the first year, success means Core Primitives has a clear strategy, prioritized roadmap, and shipped improvements that reduce the custom patterns, operational burden, and production risk developers face when building with Temporal.

What you’ll do

Own the product strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter

Translate customer, field, and open-source community signals into platform bets, deciding when to improve an existing primitive, introduce a new abstraction, change SDK/API behavior, build an integration, improve guidance, or create a more complete product experience

Partner deeply with engineering to ship core behavior improvements across server, SDKs, and APIs, making Temporal easier to model with, operate, and trust in production

Define developer experience goals and success metrics before major investments, then validate, measure, and iterate with technical users

Set clear product boundaries and success criteria so developers, internal teams, and adjacent product areas know how Core Primitives should be used and extended

Shape the external story for your area through positioning, launch narratives, documentation, examples, and close partnership with Developer Relations, Marketing, and field teams

Ship improvements with the documentation, examples, migration guidance, and launch support needed for adoption

What we’re looking for

8+ years of product management experience, with significant time on platform, infrastructure, developer tools, or other technical products

Experience turning ambiguous technical domains into clear strategy, roadmap, success measures, and shipped outcomes

Strong technical fluency in distributed systems, workflow or orchestration systems, event-driven architectures, APIs/SDKs, or comparable platform abstractions

Ability to reason about API semantics, failure modes, state management, reliability, scalability, and cost tradeoffs

High standards for developer experience across APIs, SDKs, documentation, examples, onboarding paths, and production workflows

Track record shipping technical products with engineering, then measuring adoption, learning from users, and iterating

Ability to translate emerging workload patterns, including AI agents and tool calling, into platform requirements for primitives, APIs, SDKs, and integrations

Ability to balance open-source developer experience, Cloud adoption, and enterprise production needs

Strong product storytelling for technical audiences, including strategy, launch narratives, tradeoffs, and developer-facing guidance

Nice to have

Experience with workflow engines, durable execution, job queues, data pipelines, scheduling systems, or event-driven platforms

Experience building products across multiple programming languages, SDKs, or platform surfaces

Experience with AI agent platforms, tool calling, or durable execution for AI workloads

Hands-on engineering experience or meaningful experience building with infrastructure products

Compensation

The estimated salary range for this role is $185,000 - $260,000, based 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 is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation, please let your Recruiter know so we can assist.

We are not working with external recruitment agencies, thanks.