Senior Engineering Manager - Test Systems & Tooling

Title: Senior Engineering Manager - Test Systems & Tooling Location: United States 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.