Deepinder Goyal puts fitness test at heart of Temple’s hiring drive
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Deepinder Goyal wants job applicants to bring more than a résumé to the table. He wants proof but in body fat percentage.
In a post on X, the Zomato founder said his new venture, Temple, will only consider candidates who take fitness “seriously,” spelling out a benchmark: body fat under 16% for men and 26% for women. “If you're not there yet but will commit to getting there in three months, you can apply too; but you'll be on probation until you are,” he wrote.
The hiring call marks Goyal’s clearest articulation yet of the culture he wants to build at Temple, a hardware and neuroscience-led startup focused on elite athletic performance. Goyal recently quit as Eternal’s group CEO to devote himself fully to the venture.
Building what “no other wearable” measures
Temple, according to Goyal, is working on “the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes.” He claimed the device would “measure what no other wearable in the world measures, with a level of precision that doesn't exist yet.”
To get there, he is casting a wide net across deep tech roles: analog systems engineers, electronics design engineers, and embedded systems engineers working on low-level hardware bring-up, signal and image processing, and embedded AI. The company is also hiring design and validation engineers focused on sensors, actuators, batteries, antennas and optics, along with CMF and adhesive materials engineers.
On the software and research side, Goyal listed sensor algorithms engineers specialising in estimation theory and sensor fusion; deep learning engineers building ML models for physiological metrics; computational neuroscientists; and BCI engineers handling real-time EEG and EMG acquisition and processing. Neural decoding researchers, computer vision engineers working on facial microexpressions and subvocal muscle detection, and neuroimaging ML engineers focused on multimodal sensor fusion are also on the roster.
“Engineers who are also athletes,” Goyal wrote. “People who will wear what they build, and hate it until it's perfect.”
The emphasis on physical benchmarks, rare in mainstream corporate hiring, appears designed to reinforce Temple’s positioning. “We are building for people who push their bodies to the edge. We want to be those people, not just serve them,” he said, urging candidates to write to build@temple.com with their core skill in the subject line. “Come find your tribe.”
The post has already triggered debate online, with some questioning the body fat criterion and others praising the clarity of intent. What this really signals is that Temple is not aiming for the mass fitness tracker market. Goyal is betting that elite athletes — and technologists who live like them — will build something fundamentally different.