Staff Product Manager, Core Primitives
Own product strategy and roadmap for Temporal's Core Primitives platform. Translate technical signals into bets on primitives, APIs, SDKs; partner with engineering to improve developer experience, reliability, and adoption for distributed systems and emerging AI workloads. Requires 8+ years PM experience with strong technical fluency.
About the job
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.
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, In-Home Office Setup, Professional Memberships, WFH Meals, Internet Stipend and more!
Skills
Product Management, Distributed Systems, Workflow Systems, Event-Driven Architectures, APIs, SDKs, Developer Experience, Roadmap Planning, Technical Strategy, AI Agents
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