Great tech is not enough: building trust to get the most out of Temporal

Abstract#

Temporal arrived at Cash to solve a “code red” situation, unblocking the launch of a critical feature - monthly customer statements. The feature launched, but adoption did not grow as a result. The tools, support, and budget were in place, but Cash engineers were hesitant to use Temporal for anything other than trivial background jobs and maintenance work.

Today, Temporal is in the path of all user interactions with Cash App, all inbound and outbound transfers of money, third-party partnerships with Cash App Pay, and many of the systems that power risk and safety decisions in Cash App.

Reaching broad adoption from our first use case relied on meeting our engineers where they were and rethinking the “platform team” approach to supporting our customers.

In this talk we’ll tour the tooling/processes/team rituals we built at Cash as well as the sort of use cases we were able to drive as we built confidence in the platform.

About the Presenters#

Nick Esposito works as a staff software engineer at Cash App (Block) on distributed systems, platform security, and data governance. He was previously at Twitch on the team that launched IVS - an AWS service for low latency streaming video. Outside work he is usually running or hanging out with my kiddos in NJ and the Catskills.

Riley Pruitt is an engineering manager at Cash App. He leads multiple platform engineering teams tasked with building Cash App's workflows platform and data lake. He, along with his workflows team are responsible for driving mass adoption of Temporal at Cash.