1 min read
Taking Temporal from a POC to company-wide
Notes from moving a fintech's back-office jobs onto durable workflows: onboarding, data ingestion and end-of-day.
In a brokerage, a lot of important work happens in long, multi-step jobs: opening an account, pulling in market data, calculating every portfolio at the end of the day. When one step fails halfway, you need to know exactly where, and pick up from there.
We started with cron jobs and queues, like everyone. Then I built a small proof of concept on Temporal for one onboarding flow.
What convinced the team
- Retries and timeouts are declared, not hand-written.
- Every run has a full history you can inspect step by step.
- A crashed worker resumes where it stopped. Nothing gets lost.
The POC was boring in the best way: it just kept working. That's what moved it from one flow to onboarding, data ingestion and end-of-day calculations across the company.
What I'd tell a founder
You don't need durable workflows on day one. You need them the first time a half-finished job costs a customer money. If your product moves money, that day comes sooner than you think.