Samar Abbas

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Temporal Technologies

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Samar Abbas is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Temporal Technologies, the company behind the open-source Temporal durable execution platform, which lets developers write long-running, failure-prone processes as ordinary code while the platform preserves their state through crashes and outages. He started the company with Maxim Fateev in 2019 and served as its CTO until 2024, when the two founders exchanged roles. The problem Temporal addresses is one he has worked on for most of his career: he was involved in Amazon Simple Workflow Service from its inception, led the Durable Task Framework at Microsoft Azure, and co-created Cadence, Temporal’s direct predecessor, at Uber. As CEO he has led the company through a $300M Series D at a $5B valuation in February 2026 and a $550M Series E at $12.55B seven months later.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder of Temporal Technologies in 2019; CTO until 2024, then Chief Executive Officer.
• Worked on Amazon Simple Workflow Service from its inception, alongside his future co-founder.
• Led development of the open-source Durable Task Framework at Microsoft Azure, an orchestration library for long-running, stateful workflows.
• Co-created the open-source Cadence workflow engine with Maxim Fateev at Uber, from 2015.
• As CEO, oversaw a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation in September 2026, with Temporal reporting more than 4,300 paying customers.

Professional Journey

Abbas’s career has followed a single engineering problem across three large companies: how to make multi-step, long-running software processes survive failure without every developer writing their own retry and state-recovery logic. At Amazon he worked on Simple Workflow Service from its inception, alongside Maxim Fateev. He then moved to Microsoft, where he led development of the Durable Task Framework for Azure, an open-source orchestration library for long-running, stateful workflows.

In 2015 he and Fateev reunited at Uber, where they co-created Cadence, an orchestration engine built as open source from the start. Cadence is the direct ancestor of Temporal.

The two launched Temporal in 2019 to build a company around the approach. Fateev initially held the CEO title and Abbas was CTO. In 2024 they swapped roles; in a letter marking his first year as CEO, Abbas described the change as aligning the company’s leadership with the founders’ strengths, with Fateev continuing to drive product and technology while he took on long-term direction and the team.

His tenure as CEO has coincided with a sharp increase in demand for Temporal’s platform as a reliability layer for AI applications. In February 2026 the company raised a $300M Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $5B valuation, and in September 2026 a $550M Series E at $12.55B, co-led by Lightspeed and Wellington Management. Temporal reports more than 4,300 paying customers, including OpenAI, Snap and NVIDIA. The company is remote-first, with a significant presence in the Seattle region, where Abbas has been based for decades.

Education

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