Tempo is a Toronto-based software company developing an AI-powered visual editor for React codebases. Founded in 2023, the eight-person startup graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and has raised $5M in Seed funding from investors including Paradigm, Norwest Venture Partners, and Golden Ventures. Tempo's platform combines the layout experience of design tools with the under-the-hood capabilities of an integrated development environment, allowing product managers, designers, and engineers to edit production React code visually.
Founder Backgrounds
The company was founded by CEO Kevin Michael and CTO Peter Gokhshteyn. Both co-founders earned degrees from the University of Waterloo and previously served as early engineering leaders at Perpetua prior to its $150M exit, as reported by BetaKit. Kevin Michael previously worked on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft and as a product fellow at Social Capital, while Peter Gokhshteyn worked as a software developer at Google, Bloomberg, and Zynga.
Platform Infrastructure and Scale
According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tempo migrated its core infrastructure to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Bedrock, achieving a 5X reduction in cloud computing costs while expanding to more than 100,000 users. The platform enables development teams to reuse 75% to 80% of designer-generated code, reducing quality assurance overhead and accelerating feature deployment.
In a video interview on Ignite: Conversations on Startups, VC, and Society, Kevin Michael explained that Tempo was built to address integration limitations in legacy low-code tools by operating directly on existing production repositories optimized for Vite and Tailwind. During a hackathon featured on Contra, Tempo collaborated with AWS to provide cloud resources for designers and engineers building custom applications on top of live codebases.
Team Growth and Engineering Roles
Tempo is recruiting for engineering and design roles across its Toronto headquarters and remote locations. The technical team is hiring a Software Engineer, Full Stack (In-Person - Toronto) to build platform features across the stack using TypeScript and Node, as well as a Software Engineer, LLMs & AI Agents (In-Person - Toronto) focused on optimizing AI agent workflows and prompt engineering tools.
On the product team, Tempo is hiring a Toronto-based Founding Product Designer to lead interface design and produce production-ready React and TypeScript components, along with an entry-level Product Designer - Remote to design user interfaces and experiences for the visual IDE.
Open Roles at Tempo
| Role | Location | Work Mode | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product Designer - Remote | Remote | Remote | $20,000 - $30,000 USD |
| Software Engineer, Full Stack (In-Person - Toronto) | Toronto, ON, CA | Onsite | $160,000 - $200,000 CAD |
| Software Engineer, LLMs & AI Agents (In-Person - Toronto) | Toronto, ON, CA | Onsite | $160,000 - $200,000 CAD |
| Founding Product Designer | Main Office - Toronto | Onsite | $125,000 - $200,000 CAD |
