Deepinder Goyal Announces Hiring for ‘Temple’ Wearable, Sets Fitness Benchmark for Applicants

Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato, on Friday announced large-scale hiring for his new venture, Temple, a wearable technology startup focused on elite athletic performance.

In a detailed post on X, Goyal said Temple is building what he described as the “ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes," a device that will measure physiological parameters that, according to him, no existing wearable globally is able to track with similar precision.

The announcement signals Goyal’s formal entry into the deep-tech hardware space, expanding beyond food delivery and quick commerce into performance-focused consumer technology.

Temple’s Hiring Push

Temple is recruiting across a wide spectrum of roles, many of which sit at the intersection of hardware engineering, artificial intelligence, signal processing, and neuroscience.

Open roles include:

• Analog Systems Engineers and Electronics Design Engineers

• Embedded Systems Engineers (low-level hardware bring-up, embedded signal and image processing, embedded AI)

• Design and Validation Engineers for sensors, actuators, battery systems, antennas, and optics

• CMF (Color, Material, Finish) Engineers and Adhesive Materials Engineers

• Sensor Algorithms Engineers specialising in estimation theory and sensor fusion

• Deep Learning Engineers focused on physiological metric modelling

• Computational Neuroscientists

• Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Engineers for real-time EEG/EMG acquisition and processing

• Neural Decoding Researchers working on brain activity-to-semantic mapping

• Computer Vision Engineers (facial microexpression and subvocal muscle detection)

• Neuroimaging ML Engineers for multimodal sensor fusion

In addition, Temple is hiring product managers who, as Goyal put it, can “work through Figma without needing a designer to hold their hand,” signalling a strong emphasis on product ownership and cross-functional execution.

The breadth of roles suggests Temple is attempting to build a vertically integrated wearable platform combining hardware, biosensors, machine learning models, and neural data processing, an approach typically seen in advanced health-tech or neurotech startups.

Fitness Criteria Sparks Attention

What drew equal attention, however, was a specific eligibility condition tied to physical fitness.

Goyal stated that Temple is “building for people who push their bodies to the edge,” and that the team should reflect that ethos. He wrote that applicants should have body fat below 16% (men) and 26% (women). Candidates who are not currently at those levels may apply, but would be expected to reach the benchmark within three months and remain on probation until then.

The requirement quickly triggered debate online, with some praising the clarity of vision and others questioning whether physical benchmarks should form part of hiring filters in technology roles.

Temple’s positioning appears to be aimed squarely at elite or serious performance athletes rather than the broader consumer fitness segment. Globally, the wearable market, dominated by brands like Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit, has increasingly moved toward health monitoring, heart rate variability, sleep metrics, oxygen saturation, and training load tracking. Temple appears to be targeting deeper biometric, neural, and performance-linked measurements.

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