Director, Global Developer Success - Temporal

Role Summary

Temporal is hiring a Director, Global Developer Success to lead and scale our deeply technical support organization. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for turning customer technical response into a repeatable, measurable, and differentiated advantage for Temporal.

Developer Success is the team customers rely on when they need fast, confident support for complex developer and infrastructure issues. The team helps users deploy, operate, debug, and scale Temporal across cloud-native environments, distributed systems, SDKs, observability stacks, and mission-critical workloads.

Why This Role Exists

Temporal's customers are building increasingly mission-critical, distributed, long-running, and AI-enabled systems. When something is unclear or broken, the support experience must be fast, technically credible, and predictable.

• Scale Beyond Heroics: Establish clear KPIs, tiering, queue management, escalation paths, incident communication standards, RCA practices, quality review, and talent development systems.
• Unified Operating Model: Coordinate support experiences across tickets, Slack, escalations, and incident channels so customers, Sales, SAs, Platform Architects, Product, Engineering, and Support share clear ownership.
• Drive Product Signal: Reduce avoidable Engineering escalations while ensuring real product defects, documentation gaps, and recurring customer pain reach Product and Engineering with high-quality signal.

What You'll Do

• Build and Lead Global Developer Success: Hire, coach, develop, retain, and performance-manage high-performing support engineers, managers, and specialists across tiers, regions, and customer segments.
• Create the Support Operating System: Define SLAs/OLAs, ticket and Slack triage, queue ownership, severity definitions, tiering, escalation paths, incident communications, RCA standards, quality review, staffing, and operating cadence.
• Raise the Quality Bar: Move beyond CSAT alone by measuring customer effort, touches to resolution, reopen rate, handoffs, recurrence, communication quality, resolution confidence, and customer-visible ownership.
• Harden Slack and Customer Response: Turn premium Slack response into a defined service model with acknowledgement standards, urgent paths, conversion-to-ticket rules, coverage model, manager review, and customer-facing expectations.
• Protect Engineering Focus: Reduce avoidable escalations by building runbooks, diagnostics, knowledge systems, reproducibility standards, technical triage, and high-quality escalation packets.
• Lead Escalation and Incident Discipline: Establish crisp roles for technical lead, escalation manager, communications owner, Support, Engineering, SA, Platform Architecture, and Sales during critical incidents.
• Build Technical Depth and Enablement: Create career paths, training, mentorship, certification, quality review, and hands-on learning that help engineers scale their technical expertise.
• Partner Across the Company: Work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Solutions Architecture, Platform Architecture, Customer Success, Docs, DevRel, and Services.
• Use Tooling and AI Pragmatically: Improve routing, deflection, summaries, analytics, knowledge surfacing, diagnostics, and customer communication.
• Represent Temporal with Customers: Engage directly in strategic escalations, high-stakes incidents, enterprise support conversations, QBR/EBR inputs, and executive readouts.

What You'll Bring

• 12+ years of experience in technical support, customer engineering, SRE, solutions engineering, infrastructure engineering, or similar customer-facing technical roles, with 5+ years leading support or customer-facing engineering teams.
• Proven experience building and scaling technical support operations for a deeply technical B2B product (developer tools, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, observability, AI infrastructure, open source, or distributed systems).
• Experience managing managers and building the systems that make teams run: metrics, operating cadence, queue management, quality review, staffing models, and tiering.
• Strong technical credibility with developers, support engineers, SREs, platform engineers, and product engineers across APIs/SDKs, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability, and distributed systems.
• Track record reducing avoidable Engineering escalations while improving the quality of product and engineering signal.
• Deep understanding of support quality metrics and case quality.
• Strong customer communication skills in high-pressure situations.
• High ownership and builder mindset with a clear philosophy for hiring, onboarding, leveling, and coaching.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Temporal, Cadence, workflow engines, orchestration systems, event-driven architecture, distributed applications, or production reliability tooling.
• Experience in consumption-based, open-source, developer-led, or mission-critical enterprise support motions.
• Experience with support tooling and modern AI support systems (Pylon, Zendesk, Kapa, etc.).
• Hands-on background with Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP/Azure, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Terraform, Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript.