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Temporal

Senior Engineering Manager, Test Systems & Tooling

Temporal is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager, Test Systems & Tooling. It pays $214k-$352k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Temporal.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include distributed systems, test systems and load testing.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 70 other open roles at Temporal.

AI in this role

Lead an engineering team building shared testing systems, environments, and tooling to validate platform reliability.

distributed-systemstest-systemsload-testingstress-testingengineering-management

Role Summary

Temporal’s reliability is fundamental to why customers choose us—and as our customers run increasingly critical workloads on the platform, our ability to confidently test changes must scale with that responsibility.

As a Senior Engineering Manager on the Test Systems & Tooling team, you will lead a team responsible for building the shared systems, environments, and tooling that enable Temporal engineers to validate the platform under production-like and adverse conditions. You’ll help ensure system-level testing gaps don’t fall through organizational boundaries by driving cross-team alignment, clear ownership, and measurable improvements in pre-production confidence.

What You'll Do

  • Lead and grow the Test Systems & Tooling team: Hire, coach, and develop engineers building shared testing capabilities used across Engineering.

  • Make production-like testing practical: Improve the ability for engineers to create test environments that resemble production topology, configuration, scale, and behavior—so reproducing issues and validating changes is faster and more reliable.

  • Enable production-representative workload testing: Build or evolve capabilities such as workload replay, realistic workload generation, multi-tenant testing, load testing, and stress testing to surface behaviors that only emerge at scale.

  • Drive failure-mode validation: Establish repeatable ways to test Temporal through real failure conditions (e.g., dependency failures, latency injection, resource exhaustion, degraded-state recovery, and regional failure scenarios).

  • Create shared frameworks and guidance: Provide opinionated testing frameworks, patterns, and tooling that make it easier for product teams to write high-quality tests consistently, with visibility into test health and systemic gaps.

  • Own system-level coverage outcomes: Identify critical system-level scenarios that need explicit coverage, drive them to completion (often through partner teams), and ensure they’re integrated into continuous and/or release validation.

  • Collaborate across org boundaries: Partner closely with Cloud/Infrastructure, Reliability, Release Engineering, and product teams to turn production learnings into stronger pre-production detection.

What You'll Bring

  • Experience managing and developing a high-performing engineering team (including direct reports), with strong coaching, feedback, and performance management skills.

  • Strong technical background building or operating reliable distributed systems (or adjacent platform infrastructure) and the judgment to prioritize the failure modes that matter most.

  • Track record delivering internal platforms/tooling adopted by many teams—balancing ergonomics, speed, and long-term maintainability.

  • Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where success depends on aligning stakeholders, clarifying ownership, and driving execution across multiple teams.

  • Ability to define and drive measurable outcomes (adoption, confidence signals, reduced escaped issues, faster incident-to-coverage time), not just ship tooling.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with large-scale testing practices: chaos engineering, fault injection, workload replay/shadowing, performance testing, or multi-tenant test strategy.

  • Experience partnering with Release Engineering or CI/CD platform teams to institutionalize validations in pipelines.

  • Familiarity with observability and incident response practices, and translating incident learnings into preventative test coverage.

Temporal Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Temporal Technologies does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We embrace and celebrate differences and diversity.

Temporal is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation, please let your Recruiter know so we can assist.

How we rate this

Senior Engineering Manager, Test Systems & Tooling at Temporal rates 0 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Distributed SystemsTest SystemsLoad TestingStress TestingEngineering Management

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where test systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where load testing was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where stress testing was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where engineering management was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Distributed Systems, Test Systems, Load Testing, Stress Testing, and Engineering Management. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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