Director of Global Developer Success

Summary Temporal is hiring a Director of 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.

The next phase requires a leader who can preserve technical excellence and customer empathy while building the operational rigor of a world-class support function. 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.

Developer Success must scale beyond heroics. We need clear KPIs, tiering, queue management, escalation paths, incident communication standards, RCA practices, quality review, and talent development systems. Premium customer interactions increasingly happen across tickets, Slack, escalations, and incident channels.

The support experience must have one clear operating model so customers, Sales, SAs, Platform Architects, Product, Engineering, and Support know who owns what and what good looks like. The support team must 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 will 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 through better support: 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.
• Ensure incidents and critical escalations are communicated with clarity and followed by useful RCAs. Build technical depth and enablement: Create career paths, training, mentorship, certification, quality review, and hands-on learning that help junior engineers become senior/staff support engineers and help senior engineers scale their expertise.
• Partner across the company: Work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, Solutions Architecture, Platform Architecture, Customer Success, Docs, Dev
• Rel, and Services to ensure support signal turns into product, documentation, enablement, and customer lifecycle improvements.
• Use tooling and AI pragmatically: Improve routing, deflection, summaries, analytics, knowledge surfacing, diagnostics, and customer communication while measuring real operating outcomes rather than tool adoption alone.
• Represent Temporal with customers: Engage directly in strategic escalations, high-stakes incidents, enterprise support conversations, QBR/EBR inputs, and executive readouts when support experience affects customer trust.

What you will 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, ideally in developer tools, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, observability, AI infrastructure, open source, or distributed systems within a GTM organization.

Experience managing managers and building the systems that make teams run: metrics, operating cadence, queue management, quality review, staffing models, tiering, escalation paths, and performance management. Strong technical credibility with developers, support engineers, SREs, platform engineers, and product engineers.

You can reason about APIs/SDKs, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability, distributed systems, reliability, incident response, and debugging workflows. Track record reducing avoidable Engineering escalations while improving the quality of product and engineering signal when escalations are needed.

Deep understanding of support quality metrics: response time, resolution time, customer effort, touches, reopens, recurrence, backlog, SLA/OLA attainment, deflection, CSAT, sentiment, and case quality. Strong customer communication skills in high-pressure situations. You can write crisp updates, lead customer-facing RCA conversations, set expectations, and coach others to communicate clearly.

Clear philosophy for hiring, onboarding, leveling, progression, coaching, retention, and performance management for technical support engineers and support managers. High ownership and builder mindset. You create clarity in ambiguous systems, ship v1 processes quickly, and iterate with data and customer evidence.

Nice to haves 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. Energized by working within a GTM organization.

Experience with support tooling and modern AI support systems such as Pylon, Zendesk, Kapa-like deflection, knowledge automation, case analytics, or incident communications tooling. Hands-on background with Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP/Azure, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Terraform, Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, or similar technologies.

Experience building Tier 3 / elite support, OSS/community support, self-hosted support, premium support, or 24/7 critical escalation coverage. Compensation The estimated pay range for this role is $220,000 - $275,000 based on experience and location. Equity Options - Eligible for stock options as part of Temporal's equity plan