Staff Platform Engineer – Workflow Orchestration (Temporal)

Role Overview

Senior individual contributor responsible for the design, deployment, and operational excellence of the Temporal.io workflow orchestration platform powering Medicare claims automation. Owns the Temporal Server topology on GKE, the Python SDK worker framework, and the durable-execution patterns the migration depends on. Also owns the config interpreter – the generic Python workflow that reads versioned JSON/YAML configs produced by the canvas and executes them by dispatching to a library of pre-built activities. This is the bridge that turns canvas-authored workflows into running Temporal executions; no per-workflow Python is generated or hand-written for the common case. Operates as a hands-on technical authority, influencing architecture across teams without formal authority.

This role supports a strategic platform initiative within Medicare Claims Engineering to migrate the existing Automation Anywhere RPA portfolio onto a modern, code-and-config-driven workflow platform built on Temporal.io, Python/Playwright, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Workflows are visually authored on a custom React Flow canvas that emits versioned configs executed by Temporal workers. The platform operates under HIPAA governance.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the Temporal Server cluster on GKE, including service topology, namespace strategy, persistence layer (Cloud SQL PostgreSQL with HA), and history shard sizing.
• Design and own the config interpreter: the generic Python workflow that loads canvas-authored JSON/YAML configs and dispatches to pre-built activities, eliminating the need for per-workflow Python codegen or hand-coded workflows in the common case.
• Own the activity library contract and the domain-plugin pattern that lets each trigger scenario register its SQL queries, scraping configuration, prompts, and SOAP envelopes without modifying shared executors.
• Design Python-based workflow and activity frameworks and conventions: deterministic workflow code, retry and timeout policies, heartbeating, signals for human-in-the-loop, and queries for state inspection.
• Define platform-level guardrails: workflow versioning, activity idempotency, dead letter queue patterns, and circuit breakers around downstream systems.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis for high-throughput claims processing workloads.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD for the Temporal control plane and worker pools, including blue-green deployment with task queue draining.
• Define observability standards across metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing for end-to-end claim traceability.
• Set HIPAA-aligned standards for PHI handling in workflow payloads, audit logging, retention, and long-term archival.
• Partner with SRE, Production Support, and Security teams on operational readiness, alerting, and runbooks.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on workflow patterns; lead design and code reviews; influence engineering direction through expertise, design documents, and cross-team collaboration.

Required Qualifications

• Multiple years of experience in distributed systems, platform engineering, or backend infrastructure engineering.
• Hands-on production experience with a durable workflow orchestration engine (Temporal.io strongly preferred; Cadence, Step Functions, or equivalent considered).
• Deep expertise in Python; comfort writing async Python and reasoning about determinism and replay semantics.
• Strong understanding of high-availability architectures, fault tolerance, idempotency, and disaster recovery patterns in distributed systems.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, production transactional systems.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL at scale, including connection pooling, query tuning, and backup/PITR strategies.
• Advanced troubleshooting and performance optimization skills across application, persistence, and infrastructure layers.
• Experience leveraging code generation tools like Copilot to write robust test cases and rapidly prototype features.
• Experience collaborating across architecture, security, networking, and application teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with Temporal.io including Python SDK, namespaces, advanced visibility (Elasticsearch), Archival, and Helm-based deployment.
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform: GKE, Cloud SQL, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Managed Prometheus.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and Kubernetes (Helm, autoscaling on custom metrics, network policies).
• Familiarity with DevSecOps, SRE, and AIOps practices.
• Healthcare, regulated industry, or large enterprise experience; familiarity with HIPAA/PHI handling.
• Background migrating workloads off RPA platforms (Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Blue Prism) onto code-first orchestration.