Senior Dev Success Engineer at Temporal | $180K + Equity in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior-level, hybrid technical + customer-facing role at Temporal — a well-funded, high-growth developer infrastructure company building workflow orchestration tooling used by major engineering teams. The role sits at an interesting intersection of deep systems engineering and developer advocacy.
Compensation: The $140K–$180K range is competitive for a senior individual contributor in cloud infrastructure/developer success, roughly aligned with market rates for senior SRE or platform engineer roles at growth-stage companies. The equity component adds meaningful upside if Temporal continues scaling toward a public offering.
Skills you'll build:
- Deep Kubernetes/cloud-native expertise (EKS, GKE) — highly marketable across cloud roles
- Distributed systems debugging and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTracing)
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, CDK) — top-tier DevOps skills
- Cross-functional influence: bridging product, engineering, and customers
Green flags: Mentorship from seasoned engineers is explicitly mentioned; the role has clear scope for influencing product direction; experience with remote teams is valued; the company embraces async communication norms.
Potential considerations: The customer-facing component (min. 1 year required) means this isn't purely an engineering role — expect soft-skill demands alongside deep technical work. Those seeking pure engineering IC paths may want to weigh this. However, for engineers looking to grow into solutions architecture or DevRel leadership, this is an excellent springboard.
Summary
The Senior Developer Success Engineer - West will be the frontline technical expert for our developer community. You will help users deploy and scale Temporal in cloud-native environments, troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues, optimize performance, and develop automation solutions. This role is ideal for someone who thrives on solving distributed systems challenges and improving the developer experience.
What You'll Do
-
Be a keen learner:
At Temporal, you'll work with cloud-native, highly scalable infrastructure spanning AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and microservices. You'll gain deep expertise in container orchestration, networking, and observability while learning from complex, real-world customer use cases.
Our stack includes Go, Python, and Java, providing continuous opportunities to hone your programming skills in infrastructure automation, resilience engineering, and performance tuning.
-
Be a passionate problem solver:
If you enjoy tackling scalability, reliability, and troubleshooting challenges in distributed systems, you'll thrive in this role.
As a Senior Developer Success Engineer, you'll work directly with developers to debug complex infrastructure issues, optimize cloud performance, and enhance reliability for Temporal users.
You'll develop observability solutions (Grafana, Prometheus), improve networking (load balancing, DNS, ingress/egress), and automate infrastructure operations (Terraform, IaC) to help customers run Temporal efficiently at scale.
Once ramped up, we expect you to independently drive technical solutions, whether debugging complex production issues or designing infrastructure best practices. We have seasoned engineers and mentors to support you along the way!
-
Be a great communicator:
As a Senior Developer Success Engineer you will engage directly with developers, engineering teams, and product teams to understand infrastructure challenges and provide solutions that enhance scalability, performance, and reliability.
Your insights will influence platform improvements, from enhancing observability tooling to developing self-service infrastructure solutions that simplify troubleshooting (e.g., building diagnostic tools similar to Twilio's Network Test).
You'll serve as a bridge between developers and infrastructure, ensuring that reliability, performance, and developer experience remain top priorities as Temporal scales.
What You'll Bring
Reside within the Pacific time zone (United States)
6+ years of experience as a developer, preferably fluent in one or more of the following languages: Python, Java, Golang, TypeScript.
Experience with deployment and managing medium to large-scale architectures (e.g., Kubernetes or Docker).
Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus and Grafana and troubleshooting performance and availability issues.
Minimum of one year experience in an internal or external customer-facing role.
Passion for helping others regardless of who they are or how they act.
Experience working with or as part of remote teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Seek to understand first, lead with data, and rely on facts.
Nice to Have
Previous experience in customer-facing positions such as a professional services consultant, solutions architect, customer engineer, etc.
Experience with security certificate management and implementation.
Ability to understand use cases and translate them into Temporal design decisions and architecture best practices.
Technologies: EKS, GKE, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTracing, Terraform/Ansible/CDK.
Compensation
The estimated pay range for this role is $140,000 - $180,000 based on experience and location.
Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.
Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Temporal Technologies does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We embrace and celebrate differences and diversity.
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.