Welcome! We’re excited that you’re interested in the Open Source Server Team at Temporal. If you’ve received a ping from us (or just stumbled here yourself), consider this a personal invitation. We’d love to tell you more about who we are, what we do, and why it’s an awesome time to join our team.
Overview: What Is the OSS Server Team?
We are the team that builds and maintains the Temporal open source Server – the core engine that powers Temporal’s workflow orchestration platform. Our code is at the heart of Temporal’s backend. Every feature that developers use on the server side of Temporal is owned by us. Our work serves the open-source community and forms the foundation of Temporal Cloud.
Our sub-teams and their focus areas:
- Nexus Team - Builds and operates Temporal Nexus, a platform feature for connecting durable executions across team, namespace, region, and cloud boundaries with secure, observable, at-least-once connectivity and service contracts. Nexus provides global mTLS mesh routing in Temporal Cloud, Nexus Endpoints and a Registry, and SDK support for synchronous and asynchronous Nexus Operations.
- Application Components Team (ACT) - Owns server-side workflow features and primitives surfaced to applications. Scope includes Workflow Update, Workflow Query, Signal handling, and many CHASM-based use cases, including the new Scheduler, Standalone Activity, and future Collection Operation. The team's mission is to make Temporal Server powerful and easy to use for application builders while expanding core workflow capabilities.
- Matching Service Team – Focuses on Temporal’s Task Delivery mechanics. This team ensures efficient task dispatch and balancing across workers. They own features like versioning, safe deploy, and worker insights. They also provide capability on task delivery with priority and fairness, which addresses the noisy neighbor problem for our customers building multi-tenant applications using Temporal. Solving noisy neighbor issues at the application level is a unique and impactful technical challenge.
- Server Foundations Team – Dedicated to core platform stability, scalability, and resilience. They tackle multi-tenant reliability, system protection, debugability, and dynamic configuration. Their work ensures things like noisy neighbor protection (so one rogue namespace can’t take down others), and high-scale system operation. If it’s low-level, performance-critical, or broadly impacts system health, Foundations is on it.
What the OSS Server Team Builds
We build the core of the Temporal system. Our improvements underpin thousands of Temporal Cloud customers and also directly benefit hundreds of thousands of open source community users.
Some of our focus areas include:
- Scalability: We design the server to handle massive scale – billions of workflows, high request volumes, large datasets. This includes sharding, load balancing, and throughput optimization.
- Reliability & Durable Execution: Our team makes that a reality by building fault-tolerance into every layer (consistent checking, task processing, state recovery, replication, etc). While we value iterative progress and move fast on simple changes, reliability is always our P0 and nothing takes precedence over it.
- Noisy Neighbor Protection: Through the Server Foundations team, we isolate workloads at the namespace level so that one rogue namespace can’t take down others.
- Observability & Debuggability: We ensure detailed metrics, logs, and tracing are available for developers (and our Cloud oncalls). This makes Temporal easier to operate, debug, and trust in production.
- Core Features & APIs: From versioning to schedules to workflow updates, our team delivers meaningful capabilities. We release features in stages (pre-release → public preview → GA) to gather feedback, iterate, and ensure high-quality releases.
Learn More: Talks & Content about Our Work 🔗
We love sharing what we build. Here are a few public talks and demos about our work: