Staff Product Manager, Developer Lifecycle & Tooling

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 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 The estimated salary range for this role is $185,000 - $260,000, based on experience and