Staff Product Manager, Developer Lifecycle & Tooling

About the role

Temporal is the durable execution platform that lets developers write code that survives any failure. Thousands of companies run mission-critical applications on Temporal — from payment processing to AI agent orchestration.

We're hiring a Staff Product Manager to own the developer lifecycle: the tools and experiences developers use to adopt Temporal, verify their code, and ship with confidence. You'll own the CLI, testing framework, deploy safety tooling, local development environment, and getting-started experience.

This is a high-ambiguity role. You'll define Temporal's testing strategy (do we own test servers or move to testcontainers?), deploy safety approach (replay-based, static analysis, or linting - and where does it run?), and the developer tooling vision that ties it all together. Several of these are open product questions with no obvious answer.

What you'll do

• Define and drive the strategy for developer tooling across Temporal's platform - not just ship features, but make opinionated bets on how developers should test, debug, and deploy durable applications
• Own the testing story end-to-end: make the strategic call on test infrastructure direction, define canonical patterns, and drive toward tests that developers actually trust
• Own the deploy safety story: determine the right approach for pre-deploy compatibility checking and drive it from concept to shipped product
• Unify the CLI into one coherent tool - for humans and AI agents - and define what the CLI becomes as AI-assisted development accelerates
• Collapse the getting-started experience so new developers reach a working project in minutes with production-realistic patterns
• Influence cross-SDK decisions - the tools you own work across Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, and .NET. You'll drive consistency without blocking SDK teams
• Define the developer-to-operator handoff - where "I'm shipping" ends and "it's being operated" begins
• Partner directly with engineering leadership to shape team priorities and technical direction
• Represent the developer tooling perspective in product-staff reviews and company-level planning

What you'll own

• Testing & verification - strategic direction for how Temporal code gets tested, canonical patterns, CI integration
• Deploy safety - the approach for pre-deploy compatibility checking and determinism detection
• Code evolution - how developers version, migrate, and evolve long-running applications over time
• CLI - the primary developer interface to Temporal, for humans and AI agents
• Getting started - first-run experience, scaffolding, templates that reflect real-world patterns
• Local development - dev server, project setup, and the path from zero to working project

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of product management experience, with significant time on developer tools, SDKs, CLIs, or developer infrastructure
• You've defined and driven a tooling strategy, not just executed one - you made opinionated bets about how developers should work and shipped them
• You've made build-vs-buy or keep-vs-deprecate decisions on developer-facing infrastructure and can articulate the tradeoffs years later
• You can hold a coherent vision across multiple tools that ship on different timelines to different language ecosystems
• You're comfortable operating in ambiguity - several of the biggest questions in this role don't have obvious answers yet
• You write clearly, decide quickly, and change your mind when the evidence says to
• You've partnered with engineering leadership, not just engineering teams - you influence technical direction, not just product requirements
• You understand the difference between developer tooling and production operations, and you set that boundary clearly

Nice to have

• You've personally built or contributed to a CLI, testing framework, CI pipeline, or developer tool
• Experience with distributed systems, workflow engines, or durable execution concepts
• You've worked on cross-language or cross-platform developer tools
• Familiarity with the competitive landscape: Restate, Inngest, Durable Objects, Step Functions

Compensation