Senior Software Engineer
Who We Are
At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.
We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.
We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.
If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.
Who You Are
You have run Temporal in production — not just written workflows on top of it. You've operated a self-hosted cluster yourself, configured and maintained the datastores it depends on, and reasoned about retries, idempotency, and partial failure under real load. You've been the person other teams escalate to when something breaks. You think in terms of guarantees, and you can say concretely what teams building on a shared platform should be able to assume, and how you'd prove the platform is holding up its end.
You've also led a technical migration, infrastructure consolidation, or platform re-architecture across multiple stakeholder teams — sequencing risk, owning the decision record, and driving it to completion.
This is a senior individual contributor role on Shared Services, the team that owns and operates platform shared capabilities across Justworks engineering, so product teams can build on reliable, well-run foundations without owning that complexity themselves. You would be the team's de facto Temporal tech lead and its long-term technical authority on the platform.
The role spans both halves of platform engineering: operating and hardening a live system other teams depend on today, and building the scaffolding, conventions, and documentation that make it straightforward to build on tomorrow. You'll be hands-on with reliability and migration work, and you'll help shape what the platform becomes as more teams adopt it.
What You Will Work On
- Harden the shared Temporal cluster for multi-tenant readiness — capacity modeling, namespace isolation, and admission control
- Define the service promise: SLOs for Temporal-backed services, and alerting trustworthy enough that every page is worth waking someone for
- Build the golden paths and conventions that let other teams build workflows on the shared platform safely, with less hand-holding over time
- Enable multi-cluster availability, so tenant workloads keep running through a cluster or regional failure
- Own capacity and cost efficiency as the shared platform scales to more tenant teams and workflow volume
- Partner with tenant teams on workflow design, idempotency, and safe retry patterns as they onboard
- Rotate on the shared platform's on-call schedule — incident response, root-causing production issues, writing postmortems, and continuously tuning alerts and SLOs
How You Will Do Your Work
Good judgment — the exercise of critical thinking, analyzing and assessing problems and implications, identifying patterns, making connections of underlying issues, understanding risks and developing mitigation strategies, and taking ownership of the outcome.
Resourcefulness — taking a can-do approach, even in the face of obstacles and constraints by assessing what's in front of you and effectively and efficiently optimizing what you have, whether it's working on something new or thinking about how to do something better.
Teamwork and communication — putting our collective best together through documentation, collaboration, relationship-building, listening, empathy, recruiting, and evangelism.
Influence and leadership — fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking.
Skills and knowledge — the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve.
COGIS Values
- Camaraderie — Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You're an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
- Openness — Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You're curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others.
- Grit — You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You're committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude.
- Integrity — Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You're honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example.
- Simplicity — Be like Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 2+ years of hands-on, production experience operating self-hosted Temporal — running the cluster itself, not only writing workflows against one. This is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have: experience with another workflow orchestrator does not substitute, and Temporal Cloud alone does not meet the self-host requirement
- Experience operating a distributed system in production at scale — retries, idempotency, partial failure, and the datastores and storage configuration it depends on
- Operational depth in Temporal internals and cluster administration — how the cluster is configured, maintained, and tuned, and how its constraints shape workflow design
- Experience securing and troubleshooting service-to-service communication between clients, workers, and the cluster
- Experience leading a technical migration or infrastructure consolidation across multiple stakeholder teams
- Experience defining SLOs and alerting for a platform-level service, including per-namespace / per-tenant observability and routing problems to the owning team
- Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production
- Strong Golang proficiency plus at least one additional language
Nice to Have
These are the parts of the profile we consider coachable — hands-on Temporal depth matters more than any of them:
- A specific language beyond Go
- A particular cloud or Kubernetes flavor
- A prior formal "migration lead" title — someone with deep Temporal chops can grow into leading the migration without that exact label on a resume
Technologies
- Orchestration: Temporal, self-hosted (primary focus)
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, containers
- Languages: Go (primary), plus at least one more — whatever fits the problem
- Service communication: gRPC, TLS/mTLS
The base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is targeted at $188,000.00 - $242,000.00 per year.
Use of AI Tools. We may use artificial intelligence and other automated tools to process your personal information as part of the recruitment process. For example, we may use these tools to record, transcribe, and summarize interviews, to help organize and review applications, and to help us assess candidates by comparing their skills, experience, and qualifications against the criteria for open roles. These tools support, but do not replace, human review. We do not make hiring decisions based solely on automated processing, and all final hiring decisions are made by Justworks recruiters and hiring managers. Depending on where you reside, you may have rights regarding our use of automated tools. For more information, please contact us at privacy@justworks.com.#LI-Hybrid #LI-RG1
Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location. Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location.
For more information about Justworks’ Total Reward Philosophy, including all of the perks and benefits we are proud to offer our team members, please visit Total Rewards @ Justworks.
Diversity At Justworks
Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on their sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If you're in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at accommodations@justworks.com. Your comfort and success matter to us, and we're here to ensure an inclusive experience.