This Staff Product Manager role oversees the strategy and roadmap for core platform primitives in an open-source programming model. You will focus on reducing operational complexity and improving developer experience for distributed systems.
What you’d own
Product strategy and roadmap for a focused Core Primitives charter
Technical requirements for APIs, SDKs, and server behavior
Developer experience goals and success metrics
External positioning, launch narratives, and documentation
Who it’s for
A fit if you…
✓You have 8+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or developer tools
✓You possess deep technical fluency in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or API semantics
✓You can translate ambiguous technical domains into clear roadmaps and shipped outcomes
✓You have experience balancing open-source community needs with enterprise production requirements
Not for you if…
✗You prefer shipping isolated features over long-term platform strategy
✗You lack the technical depth to reason about failure modes, state management, and scalability
✗You prefer a role without heavy emphasis on documentation, examples, and migration guidance
Reading between the lines
The mention of 'custom patterns' and 'operational burden' implies you will be inheriting a complex, potentially fragmented technical debt.
The requirement to 'translate emerging workload patterns' into requirements suggests you will need to proactively identify and define new markets for the platform.
Partnering with engineering to 'turn strategy into coherent behavior' across multiple surfaces implies high-intensity cross-functional coordination.
Not sure this one is for you? See the best-fit roles across 1,522 open PM roles.
Paste your resume — it runs in your browser. Free, no signup, nothing uploaded.
Location: United States - Remote Opportunity
Department: Product Management
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 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. We are not working with external recruitment agencies, thanks.
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.
We use analytics cookies to measure how the site is used. See the privacy policy.
Privacy preferences
Choose what may be stored on this device. You can change this any time
from “Privacy preferences” in the footer, and the privacy policy explains each one.