Senior Staff Product Marketing Engineer, Competitive Intelligence - Temporal

Role Summary

Temporal competes with products, internal systems, familiar habits, and the decision to do nothing. Customers may compare it with cloud workflow services, orchestration frameworks, job queues, databases, AI agent tools, or a platform they built themselves. We need to know which alternatives enter a deal, why Temporal wins or loses, and which differences matter to the customer.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Product Marketing Engineer to focus on competitive benchmarking, positioning, and messaging. You will combine win-loss analysis, field evidence, pricing research, hands-on product evaluation, and reproducible benchmarks to improve positioning, help the field compete, and recommend changes to Product, Engineering, and company leadership.

This is a company-wide role where you will build the competitive intelligence program rather than inherit one, deciding what we track, how claims are verified, how findings reach the field, and which issues require an executive decision.

What You Will Do

• Co-build Temporal's competitive intelligence program, focusing on benchmarking, thought leadership content, and sales support.
• Install, configure, and use competing products and adjacent technologies to understand their architecture, developer experience, operational model, strengths, limits, pricing, and packaging.
• Design and run fair, reproducible benchmarks and technical evaluations, documenting methods, assumptions, environments, results, and limitations.
• Turn competitive evidence into positioning and reusable material for the field, including technical battlecards, comparison guides, objection handling, demos, internal briefings, launch input, and public technical content.
• Partner with the Solutions and GTM Director to triage recurring technical questions from Sales and Solutions Architecture.
• Respond quickly to major competitor launches, product claims, pricing changes, market shifts, and high-stakes opportunities.
• Build trusted relationships across Sales, Solutions Architecture, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering to gather intelligence.
• Publish a monthly update and lead a quarterly executive review covering market changes, competitive posture, and actionable recommendations.
• Set a high evidence standard, clearly stating what is known, how it was known, and where evidence depends on workload or configuration.
• Partner with Enablement to turn competitive intelligence into training and field guidance, measuring coverage, freshness, and impact.
• Take on adjacent technical work when priorities shift, such as launches, reference implementations, or emerging competitors.

What You Will Bring

• A record of building or substantially improving a competitive intelligence program for a technical product in roles such as technical product marketing, solutions architecture, sales engineering, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, application architecture, and operational tradeoffs in production software.
• Ability to deploy and evaluate unfamiliar technology, read source code, build test harnesses, and troubleshoot results.
• Proficiency in languages such as Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, C#, or PHP, plus comfort with containers, cloud environments, and automation tools.
• Experience with performance or reliability testing, covering latency, throughput, CPU, memory, storage, network, failure modes, and cost.
• Clear writing, sound judgment, and executive presence to brief leadership and guide the field through contested deals.
• Intellectual honesty and strong judgment, avoiding cherry-picked results or unsupported claims.
• Independent execution across multiple workstreams with the ability to adapt quickly to shifting priorities.
• Experience writing technical white papers and delivering them at key conferences.

Nice to Have

• Experience with workflow engines, durable execution, event-driven systems, cloud workflow services, job systems, or AI agent frameworks.
• Experience publishing technical benchmarks, comparison content, white papers, or open-source reference projects.