Maxim Fateev

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Temporal Technologies

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Maxim Fateev is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Temporal Technologies, the company behind the open-source Temporal durable execution platform. Developers use it to write long-running, failure-prone processes as ordinary code while the platform keeps their state through crashes and outages. He and Samar Abbas started Temporal in 2019. Fateev held the CEO title until 2024, when the two founders swapped roles. Temporal’s origins run through his earlier work: he led the architecture of AWS Simple Workflow Service at Amazon and co-created the Cadence workflow engine at Uber. In September 2026 Temporal raised $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Temporal Technologies with Samar Abbas in 2019 and is now its Chief Technology Officer.
• Served as Temporal’s CEO until 2024, when he and Abbas swapped roles.
• Spent eight and a half years at Amazon, joining in 2002. He led development of the messaging infrastructure that became the foundation for Amazon SQS and led the architecture of AWS Simple Workflow Service.
• At Uber from 2015, built the Cherami messaging system and co-created the Cadence workflow engine, both released as open source.
• Has also held engineering roles at Google and Microsoft.

Professional Journey

Fateev joined Amazon in 2002, while the company was moving its website from a single monolithic application to a service-oriented architecture. According to Temporal, in 2004 he led development of the messaging infrastructure that became the basis for Amazon Simple Queue Service. He went on to lead the architecture and development of AWS Simple Workflow Service, which coordinates long-running asynchronous tasks, and developed the Amazon Flow Framework. Samar Abbas worked with him on Simple Workflow Service. Temporal’s own account says the service was conceptually strong but hard for developers to use, and that this shaped what the two built later. In all he spent eight and a half years at Amazon. He has also held engineering roles at Google and Microsoft.

In 2015 he and Abbas reunited at Uber, where Fateev built the Cherami messaging system and the two co-created Cadence. Cadence was a workflow orchestration engine designed to be open source from the start. Temporal says it powered many of Uber’s services and applications, and GeekWire reports it was used outside Uber by companies including HashiCorp, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Coinbase.

The two founders launched Temporal in 2019 to take Cadence’s ideas further, around a concept they call durable execution. Fateev was initially chief executive and Abbas chief technology officer. In 2024 they exchanged roles, so Fateev now leads the technology side. Temporal is released under the MIT licence and also sells a hosted cloud service.

Growth has been rapid. GeekWire reported in February 2026 that Temporal had raised a $300 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $5 billion valuation, and that it had about 375 employees. On 14 September 2026 the company announced a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation, co-led by Lightspeed and Wellington Management. It said it had more than 4,300 paying customers, including OpenAI, Snap and NVIDIA, and 570 employees. Temporal is a remote-first company. According to GeekWire, both founders have been based in the Seattle area for decades.

Education

No education record was found in any first-party or dated press source.