Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundations (AI Agent Optimization)

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!

Summary

We have an opening to hire a Staff Software Engineer - Agent Optimization

Temporal provides a reliable foundation powering AI leaders such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and others. Its adoption is expanding to users spanning a broad range of AI applications ranging from agents to data pipelines and everything in between.

The mission of the AI Foundations team is to accelerate Temporal adoption across the entire ecosystem. Our approach combines a deep understanding of use cases with rigorous application of computer systems and software design principles.

In this role, you will lead our agent optimization efforts. You will design tools and mechanisms to help Temporal users build agents that are optimized for token spend and response time while maintaining result quality. Model routing is a first step, but represents the tip of the iceberg of techniques that we can apply. For example, multi-agent architecture, cache policy, and context management are all relevant. Candidates for this role should have direct experience with this problem domain.

You will work closely with other AI Foundations team members, e.g., those who focus on agentic development, maintaining a set of agents skills that lift performance of Codex, Claude Code, and similar tools for developers of Temporal applications. Other team members build ecosystem integrations or develop policy and security systems.

If you thrive on blending theory and practice, then this is the right team for you. We are an action-oriented group that loves to ship fast and solve customer problems. We also seek thorough technical grounding for our work and invest in systems and practices that foster long-term success.

Most of Temporal’s work is open source—see for yourself here: https://github.com/temporalio [new window]

What You Will Do

• Work as a software engineer
• Maintain and expand a deep understanding of agentic coding
• Design and build agentic coding systems that we can trust to deliver high-quality outputs
• Develop a deep understanding of AI application development patterns and techniques, including emerging approaches and architectures.
• Take end-to-end ownership of new features, working with other teams to deliver exceptional reliability and a great developer experience.
• Work with multiple programming languages: Python and TypeScript, Java, Go.
• Serve as a domain expert on AI design patterns, collaborating with field staff to provide best-practices and canonical examples.
• Work directly with our developer community to debug issues that need expert attention and get feedback on Temporal features and APIs.
• Write public technical documentation describing Temporal concepts and APIs.
• Go the extra mile to support a customer in need, on the rare occasion that our teams’ engineering expertise is needed.
• Travel to meet your coworkers for a week once or twice a year.
• Attend the occasional developer conference to talk about how great Temporal is (optional).

What You Won’t Do

• Work as a Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Devops SWE, or SRE.
• Work in an office (unless you want to, but you’d be by yourself). Temporal is a fully-remote company.
• Commit code that’s poorly-tested or works “most of the time”. Temporal aspires to be “Reliable as Gravity”, and we expect our code to be the same.
• Work behind closed doors. Our work is open source—that means PRs and comments are open to the public, too.
• Sit in meetings all day. We mostly communicate in writing, and use meetings mainly for status updates and thorny issues that need input from the whole group.
• Wake up to pager alerts. We’re extremely active in supporting our customers and the community, but we don’t do 24/7 on-call.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years of professional work experience.
• Proven experience in optimizing AI systems using both machine learning and systems techniques
• Experience and passion for harnessing generative AI, particularly for agents and coding.
• A deep appreciation for how to use AI to improve quality, not only to increase quantity. 
• A sense of taste in code and software development practice. Your approach should be opinionated and thoughtful, but not dogmatic.
• Fluency in multiple programming languages, and an affinity for learning new ones.
• Deep experience with concurrent programming—you should know how to use mutexes, atomics, and other concurrency primitives safely.
• Experience designing APIs and writing documentation for publicly-available libraries or modules.
• Strong technical communication skills—written and verbal—in English.
• BS or MS in Computer Science (or a closely-related degree), or equivalent work experience writing production-grade software.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Temporal’s programming model (e.g. you’ve written an app on Temporal).
• A track record of open source software contributions, including contributions to 3rd party libraries. 
• Experience contributing to the architecture and design of large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep background in machine learning, model training, data science, or machine learning systems.
• Graduate degree in Computer Science.