Staff Product Manager, Developer Lifecycle & Tooling
Leads strategy for developer tooling at Temporal, owning testing, deploy safety, CLI unification, and getting-started experiences across multiple SDKs. Requires 8+ years in product management with deep developer tools expertise.
About the job
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 location. Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.
Skills
Cli, SDKs, CI/CD, Testing Frameworks, Developer Tools, Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .Net, Distributed Systems, Workflow Engines
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