#234 - Building for Reliability: Durable Execution & Insights from Temporal's Report - Preeti Somal
Tech Lead Journal
Reliability Challenges in Agentic AI Systems
Preeti breaks down multi-step AI workflows, failure modes, rate limits, long running steps, and Temporal's reliability role.
How much of your code exists only to prevent failures? Discover a new paradigm for building reliable applications.
In this episode, Preeti Somal, SVP at Temporal, explores a paradigm shift that can dramatically boost productivity and give developers peace of mind. Drawing on her experience leading massive infrastructure at Yahoo and HashiCorp, she explains Temporal’s concept of durable execution that helps developers focus on business logic and remove reliability concerns. Preeti also discusses key findings from Temporal’s first State of Development Report.
In this episode, you will learn about:
- Lessons from operating large-scale systems at Yahoo and HashiCorp
- Why reliability ranks higher than cost for most engineering teams
- How durable execution removes reliability complexity from developer concerns
- Why unlearning old patterns proves harder than learning Temporal’s model
- Creating a strong incident response culture through blameless post-mortem
- Nurturing psychological safety in infrastructure teams and on-call engineers
- Building security and compliance from day one versus retrofitting later
Timestamps:
- (00:00) Trailer & Intro
- (02:20) Career Turning Points
- (04:43) Key Learnings from Operating Large Scale Infrastructure
- (07:56) Key Learnings on Platform Engineering
- (09:59) Key Learnings on Maintaining High Reliability
- (12:02) Key Highlights Working at HashiCorp
- (13:52) Running Infra as Code using Temporal
- (15:28) Key Principles for Managing a Strong Incident Response
- (18:37) The Importance of Nurturing Psychological Safety within Infra Team
- (21:13) The Temporal’s State of Development Report
- (22:39) The State of AI Usage & Adoption
- (23:54) Using Temporal for Building AI Applications
- (26:06) The Complexities Involved in Building AI Applications
- (28:51) Key Learnings from Temporal’s State of Development Report
- (31:03) The Choice of Developer Tooling Misalignment
- (33:12) Integrating Security, Compliance, and Cost into Your Engineering Mindset
- (33:39) Building with Security and Compliance-First Mindset
- (36:57) Temporal Paradigm Shift
- (39:14) How Temporal Hides Away The Complexities of Building Reliable Applications
- (42:47) Unlearning Required for Using Temporal Programming Model
- (46:33) Getting Started Building with Temporal
- (48:34) Temporal’s Durable Execution Guarantee
- (51:23) The Concern About Temporal Lock-In
- (54:09) Temporal’s Strong Developer Focus
- (56:16) The Compliance and Security Aspect of Temporal Cloud
- (58:41) 3 Tech Lead Wisdom
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Preeti Somal’s Bio
Preeti is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Temporal. Preeti is passionate about building great products, growing world class organizations and solving complex problems. Prior to Temporal, Preeti led the Platform, Security and IT engineering organizations at HashiCorp. Her extensive career includes engineering leadership roles at Yahoo!, VMware and Oracle. While at Yahoo! Preeti was VP of Cloud Services in the Platform organization delivering highly scalable services used by engineers across Yahoo to build and operate applications with improved agility, reliability and security. These services power Yahoo!’s consumer and advertising business.
Follow Preeti:
- LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/preeti-somal-131890
- Twitter – x.com/psomal
- 📖 Temporal’s State of Development Report 2025 – temporal.io/pages/state-of-development-2025
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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/234.
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