Senior Engineering Manager, Builder Tools

As a Senior Engineering Manager on the Builder Tools team, you will lead a team that empowers a company of builders by delivering a frictionless, standardized ecosystem of core engineering and AI tools. You’ll operate like internal Forward Deployed Engineers—partnering directly with teams across the company to accelerate safe, effective AI adoption—while also being an early adopter of our own AI products to create a tight feedback loop with product leadership.

You will balance speed with reliability: removing invisible barriers that break flow, building paved paths, and prioritizing measurable business impact.

• →Set direction for AI-assisted development, end-to-end: Define the engineering-wide approach for safe, effective AI-assisted workflows (tooling standards, rollout strategy, and adoption).
• →Build frictionless paved paths: Identify and remove sources of friction in developer workflows; deliver a small set of deeply reliable, well-supported paved roads rather than many bespoke bypasses.
• →Internal AI platform strategy (build vs. buy): Own strategy and execution for internal agent runtimes and developer-facing AI systems (authoring, review, and automation workflows), including vendor evaluation and integrations.
• →Governance, cost, and measurement: Drive governance and cost management for AI tooling (usage measurement, guardrails, optimization) using clear metrics and frameworks (e.g., DORA/SPACE) to translate improvements into business outcomes.

• A strong bias toward action, curiosity, and focus on impact.
• Experience leading teams focused on developer productivity, DevEx, internal platforms, or engineering tooling.
• Track record of driving adoption of new workflows and platforms across an engineering organization.
• Ability to operate across boundaries and influence without direct ownership; comfort acting as an internal forward-deployed partner.
• Strong coaching and feedback skills, creating an environment where engineers can grow and ship high-quality systems.

• Experience evaluating and deploying AI coding tools, developer assistants, and/or LLM-based workflows and agents.
• Intuition for when to adopt vs. build, and how to standardize without blocking innovation.

• Strong software engineering background (backend, platform, or developer tools).
• Familiarity with modern developer workflows and the systems that support them.
• Ability to engage deeply in technical discussions around system design, safety guardrails, operational readiness, and tradeoffs.

• Ability to translate ambiguous needs into clear guidance and systems.
• Strong empathy for builders and their workflows (including non-traditional developers).
• Experience prioritizing and communicating based on measurable impact, not just qualitative feedback.

• Experience building measurement systems for tooling outcomes (adoption, reliability, cycle time, cost-to-serve, AI spend).

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.