Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives
TemporalThis Staff Product Manager role focuses on infrastructure primitives to simplify how developers build long-running workflows and manage production workloads across server, API, and SDK layers.
What you’d own
- Core Primitives charter strategy and roadmap
- Developer experience for APIs, SDKs, and documentation
- Translation of community signals into platform bets
- Product boundaries and success metrics for technical users
Who it’s for
A fit if you…
- ✓8+ years of experience in infrastructure, developer tools, or platforms
- ✓Deep technical fluency in distributed systems and API semantics
- ✓Ability to translate complex technical domains into clear product narratives
- ✓Experience balancing open-source needs with enterprise production requirements
Not for you if…
- ✗You prefer building consumer-facing features over developer-centric infrastructure
- ✗You prefer high-certainty tasks over ambiguous, broad technical domains
- ✗You prefer working on a single product surface rather than across SDKs and APIs
Reading between the lines
- The focus on 'reducing custom patterns' suggests the current developer experience involves significant manual work or complex workarounds.
- Requirement to handle 'AI agents and tool calling' implies the roadmap will involve integrating emerging AI infrastructure trends.
- Emphasis on 'migration guidance' and 'launch support' indicates a need to manage breaking changes in existing technical systems.
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Benefits
Full job description
Compensation: $160K – $262.5K • Offers Equity • Multiple Ranges
ROLE SUMMARY
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 YOU'LL BRING
- 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
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.
About Temporal
See all roles →Temporal is an open-source durable execution platform that lets developers write reliable distributed applications without building their own retry, state, and recovery logic. Used by Stripe, Datadog, Snapchat, OpenAI, Cloudflare, GitLab, and roughly 1,500 paying customers, it processes around 130 billion actions per month and is backed by a community of 14,000+ developers. Co-founders Samar Abbas and Maxim previously built the Cadence workflow engine at Uber and earlier worked on AWS Simple Workflow and Azure's Durable Task Framework, so Temporal sits in a deep lineage of distributed systems work. The team is remote-first with flexible hours, 20 weeks of paid birth-parent leave, fertility planning support, and stipends for WeWork or other coworking spaces.
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