Senior Solutions Architect, Commercial - San Francisco

Summary

Temporal is looking for a Senior Solutions Architect to support our Commercial Sales team in a consumption-based business where customer success drives revenue growth. You'll work across the full sales cycle, from initial technical evaluations with new prospects through helping existing customers expand their use of Temporal in production. The nature of our business means you'll spend significant time helping customers who've already adopted Temporal unlock more value by expanding into additional use cases, teams, and workloads.
This is a high-velocity, technically deep role. You'll partner with developers, architects, and engineering leaders at fast-moving companies to help them understand how Temporal fits into their existing architecture and prove out value through hands-on technical work. You'll be working in a consumption model where usage grows over time, which means building strong technical relationships and staying engaged with accounts as they scale.
As an early member of a growing team, you should be comfortable with ambiguity, frequent context switching, and creating leverage through reusable assets that help the broader team move faster.

Must reside in San Francisco, CAWhat You'll Do

• Partner with Account Executives throughout the sales cycle to qualify new opportunities, run technical evaluations, and expand production usage with existing customers
• Lead technical conversations with developers, architects, and engineering leaders to understand their systems, constraints, and business objectives
• Build tailored demos and proof-of-concepts that showcase how Temporal solves specific customer problems, including orchestration of AI and agentic workloads
• Deliver enablement sessions that help customer engineering teams adopt Temporal effectively
• Create reusable technical assets that accelerate deals and scale the team's impact
• Enable the Commercial Sales team by educating AEs on Temporal fundamentals, common patterns, and opportunity qualification
• Manage multiple prospects and customers simultaneously, prioritizing effectively across urgent needs and strategic work in a fast-moving environment
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Developer Success to surface field insights that influence the roadmap

What You'll Bring

• Strong development background with hands-on coding experience in at least one modern language (Go, Java, TypeScript, or Python)
• Deep understanding of distributed systems (reliability, observability, and fault tolerance)
• Proven experience in a pre-sales, customer-facing engineering, or solutions architecture role working with technical buyers
• Exceptional time management and prioritization skills with the ability to thrive in high-volume environments
• Enthusiasm for AI/ML technologies and eagerness to learn about emerging use cases in agentic workflows and LLM orchestration
• Strong technical communication skills and ability to lead conversations with senior engineers while translating complex concepts for diverse audiences
• Comfortable creating structure where there is none

Nice to Haves

• Experience with workflow engines, event-driven architectures, or orchestration technologies (Temporal, Cadence, or similar)
• Background articulating the value of commercial SaaS offerings that compete with open source alternatives (Redis, Kafka, Databricks, etc.)
• Contributions to developer tooling, open source projects, or technical content
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with the ability to serve as a technical bridge between customers and internal teams
• Certifications with any of the major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) or foundational AI model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google)

Compensation

• The estimated pay range for this role is $200,000 - $250,000 OTE.
• This is a base-salary, variable role with a 70/30 split.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Temporal's equity plan.