Senior Staff Software Engineer, Unified Proxy

We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer in Temporal's Cloud Global Services team to lead the technical strategy and execution of the Unified Temporal Proxy initiative. This individual will be responsible for consolidating disparate proxy implementations into a single, extensible, open-source, and productized solution. The unified proxy is not only a critical enabler for customers—providing security, encryption, and advanced integration capabilities—but also a core component of Temporal Cloud’s own infrastructure, powering hybrid-cloud scenarios and new functionality such as HTTP endpoint support and AI/agent workloads.

The role spans architecture, cross-team collaboration, customer engagement, open-source leadership, and long-term product ownership, with a mandate to build and deliver a reliable, extensible foundation that will serve both customer-facing and internal needs for years to come.

The Need for a General Proxy

The Unified Proxy will be a critical enabler for both customers and Temporal Cloud. It is a foundational component that will unlock the next phase of Temporal’s platform evolution:

• Customer Trust Security

  Customers can depend on the proxy as a secure, production-grade tool that enforces policies consistently and reduces the risk of misconfiguration across all Temporal-related activities. Key concerns addressed include payload encryption, fine-grained authorization logic, and integration with custom identity stores, among others.

• Enabling New Critical Functionality

  The unified proxy introduces capabilities that are otherwise not possible, such as migrations between self-hosted clusters and Temporal Cloud without requiring complex custom setups. It will also become the preferred way to support HTTP endpoints for Temporal services, expanding accessibility and simplifying integrations.

• Foundation for the AI Era

  In a future where AI agents are abundant and interact via the Temporal Nexus protocol with MCP servers, the proxy will serve as a central component to ensure secure, controlled, and seamless communication patterns.

• Core Part of Temporal Cloud Infrastructure

  Beyond enabling customer adoption, the unified proxy is a pillar of Temporal Cloud’s own infrastructure, powering internal services and extending Temporal’s ability to support hybrid-cloud and enterprise-grade scenarios.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership
  • Define and drive the architecture for a unified, pluggable proxy framework.
  • Establish technical standards for authentication, authorization, encryption, and observability across proxy implementations.
  • Evaluate and integrate existing customer-built, S2S, and Cloud Auth proxies into a single supported solution.
• Strategic Alignment Productization
  • Translate high-level business and security requirements into technical designs.
  • Ensure proxy meets Tier 0 workload reliability, security, and performance standards.
  • Partner with Product, Security, and Customer Success to align roadmap with customer needs.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Work closely with Infra Foundations, Security, OSS Server, and CGS teams.
  • Engage directly with strategic customers to understand and incorporate their requirements.
  • Mentor other engineers on distributed systems architecture, networking, and security.
• Open Source Developer Experience
  • Drive the open-source development model, ensuring code quality, documentation, and extensibility.
  • Advocate for and implement patterns that simplify adoption by both internal and external developers.

Qualifications

Must-Have Technical Skills

• Proven experience architecting and delivering high-availability, security-critical networking or proxy systems.
• Deep understanding of authentication/authorization patterns (OIDC-OpenID Connect on top of OAuth), mTLS, JWT-JASON Web Token, custom identity integrations).
• Expertise in data encryption at rest and in transit, including envelope encryption and key management.
• Strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems programming language.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, RPC frameworks (gRPC), and cloud networking patterns.

Leadership Impact

• Track record of leading complex, multi-team technical initiatives to successful delivery.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, define vision, and create alignment.
• Experience influencing technical direction across organizational boundaries.

Nice-to-Have

• Previous contributions to open-source networking or security projects.
• Experience with hybrid cloud architectures and customer-facing APIs.
• Knowledge of Temporal architecture and its SDK ecosystem.

Success Criteria (12–18 Months)

• Unified proxy is in production use for key customers, with measurable improvements in reliability, maintainability, and adoption.
• Pluggable architecture enables rapid development of new proxy features.
• Documentation, tooling, and test coverage meet Tier 0 production standards.
• Customer feedback reflects improved integration experience and reduced operational burden.
• Existing fragmented proxies developed on the Temporal Cloud side are deprecated in favor of the unified, productized solution, with a clear migration path for internal teams and customers.

Compensation

• The estimated salary range for this role is $230,000 - $290,000.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.