(Part 1)
Company
At the time of my last update, the company had 116 people. Now we are over 300. The Go-to-Market organization is now larger than Engineering. Some studies claim that our ancestors couldn’t handle tribes of over about 150 people. We are definitely past the point when one could know every employee. The loss of intimacy is offset by the feeling that we now have resources — a growing number of teams focusing on different areas while collaborating on cross-group efforts.
With such growth, we are doubling down on our efforts to foster and reemphasize consistency in our hiring practices, decision-making, behavioral patterns, and rules of engagement, otherwise referred to as values and culture. In my previous life within a huge corporation, those things generally made sense to me, but they also felt somewhat artificial and performative. Within the context of a small company with a relatively flat structure, it feels very different — much closer to home. This makes me genuinely attentive to such aspects and eager to contribute where I can. Just recently, we rolled out our updated values.
My impression is that at least half of the VC money these days goes to companies with corporate domains ending in “.ai,” and aside from that, funding isn’t easy. We raised our C round early this year with a very good, some say almost exceptional, multiple. This tells us that the investors have a strong conviction about our product, business model, and growth. I’m no VC, but I see how they are impressed with the quality of the use cases and the caliber of customers that come to our cloud. I hope they know better than I do how to assess and evaluate such factors. Since the C round, we’ve also had a secondary round that pushed the company’s valuation significantly higher.
Keeping the hiring bar high continues to be a top priority. With the turmoil in the job market and Temporal becoming a better-known brand, we now have access to a larger pool of high-quality engineering talent. The interview process is still more art than science, and scaling and improving this art as the company grows is a challenge by itself. Hiring at the junior levels has its own difficulties. Recently, we had to close an open SDE 1 position after only a few hours because, during that time, we received more than 3,000 applications. We found that the old recipe still works well — filling junior positions via internships.
We are still fully remote, with WeWork as an option for folks who want to come into the office. We are geo-distributed but not very balanced. Most of Engineering is on the U.S. West Coast, with roughly a tie between the Seattle and Bay areas. Smaller pockets are in Colorado, North Carolina, and the cities of New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver. The GTM team has its own distribution. My impression is they are more heavily tilted toward the East Coast.
We settled on an annual all-company offsite (we started with twice a year). We complemented it with smaller team offsites and are now aggregating them into an annual R&D offsite, side by side with GTM’s sales kickoff event. We’ll see how this goes. There doesn’t appear to be a simple solution for doing it right, and each company needs to find its own rhythm. From time to time, we leverage the West Coast’s locality for in-person meetings to discuss some critical decisions or designs. In such cases, we consciously violate the remote-first setup for the sake of high-throughput discussions and faster decision-making — at the unfair expense of colleagues who can’t attend in person and have to connect via Zoom.
Replay
It was a bold move in August 2022 to start our own annual conference. The inaugural edition was in Seattle. The 2023 and 2024 editions were in Bellevue, WA, growing bigger each year. In 2025, we held the event in London to reach audiences unlikely to travel to the U.S. Attending Replay is a very special experience. Seeing so many engineers and engineering leaders talking non-stop about your product and presenting on stage what they’ve built with it is a special kind of pleasure. I presented at all Replays but the very first one. In 2023, my talk was on the second day and I talked with folks so much before then that my voice let me down close to the end of my presentation. I guess that’s why no recording of it was published. But I gave slightly different versions of the same talk at J on the Beach and QCon SF that year.
Replay 2026 will be in San Francisco — at Moscone, no less. It should be epic. I’ll need to rewatch the Silicon Valley documentary before going there.
Operations
We operate a multi-million-dollar business based on a single product — Temporal Cloud. Our customers trust us with their hot-path business processes — often their most critical ones. This is an interesting phenomenon. They choose Durable Execution of Temporal to make their applications resilient to various failures. Naturally, they first and foremost care about the reliability of their most critical services. Some choose to self-host Temporal Server with all its dependencies. Many don’t view it as their core competency — operating such complex production machinery — and they come to our cloud service with their most precious workloads. It is amazing and sobering at the same time when big Internet household names bring us their “crown jewels” to run — even those who have a policy of not taking a dependency on SaaS vendors in the critical path. It was eye-opening to hear, on a couple of occasions, a customer say, “We only have two external dependencies — AWS and Temporal Cloud.”
Customer expectations are very high. Sometimes it feels like they set them higher for us than for the hyperscalers. We now have about eight engineering on-call rotations (teams), covering different areas of the system, plus one for on-call managers who coordinate across teams, and another for the Developer Success team that communicates with customers. This may seem large for our company size, but that’s the nature of the service we run.
We use incident.io for managing incidents. It integrates nicely with Slack, creates a per-incident channel, and automatically adds the current on-call engineers to it, among other things. We saw great promise in the early days of their product. They haven’t disappointed and are growing fast. Like most folks, we use statuspage.io for public incidents and pagerduty.com for on-call paging. Incident.io also integrates with Jira to automatically turn incident follow-ups into tickets, helping us continuously improve the system.
Replication
Temporal inherited the application-level replication stack from Cadence. Over the years, we dramatically improved it and added Control Plane functionality to manage it. Initially, we used replication to transparently migrate customer namespaces from Cell to Cell. After we got it working at the level we were happy with, we exposed it to customers as high-availability options — multi-region, cross-cloud, and single-region replication.
At first, few customers immediately understood why they would want to pay double (due to the duplicate hardware needed) for such a feature. Some just used it, at our suggestion, as a tool for migrating their workloads from one region or cloud provider to another. The recent GCP and AWS us-east-1 outages vindicated the paranoid among our customers who refused to accept that “cloud regions pretty much never go down.”
Customers who had replication enabled for their namespaces were able to fail over to the other region or cloud, and their applications continued executing as if nothing had happened. We discovered a few misses on our side and had to fail over some namespaces manually, with a longer delay than we expected. The important part is that replicated namespaces continued running after failover. We saw a major spike in customers setting up replication in the days after the AWS us-east-1 outage. One customer was in the process of migrating their namespace from AWS to GCP during GCP’s global outage. They weren’t impacted and didn’t even need to fail over because their active replica was still in AWS. They were considering keeping the cross-cloud replication running indefinitely after that.
I gave a conceptual talk about replicated namespaces, but the topic probably deserves its own post.
Road ahead
With great opportunities come great responsibility and pressure to execute and realize those opportunities. We still have to strike the right balance between running a highly reliable service and investing in new functionality. It’s a deeply humbling experience to see that some of the world’s top companies — household names with tens or even hundreds of millions of users — take an all-in dependency on Temporal Cloud. This leaves no room for hubris, complacency, or sloppiness. We have to keep pushing the reliability and quality bar higher without hampering further development of the product.
I don’t believe there’s a general recipe for how to grow an organization, be it engineering, R&D, or the whole company. We’ll have to navigate our own path — growing sustainably while preserving what has made us successful so far and learning new ways in parallel. It’s exciting and somewhat dizzying at the same time. Yet I feel we are still only getting started.
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