‘Less body fat is non-negotiable’: Deepinder Goyal’s hiring rule for Temple makes noise online

Deepinder Goyal’s hiring criteria for Temple triggers online debate.

In a hiring post that has sparked sharp debate online, former Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has made personal fitness a non-negotiable criterion for applicants to Temple, the performance-tech venture he is backing. Goyal said Temple is looking for engineers and product leaders who are “obsessive about the craft and the category” and who also live the athlete’s life. The post explicitly asks applicants to have body fat below 16% for men and 26% for women, or to commit to reaching that benchmark within three months, during which they would remain on probation.

The hiring call lists a wide sweep of deep-tech roles from analog systems and embedded engineers to computational neuroscientists, BCI specialists, computer vision engineers, and neuroimaging ML experts. Product managers, Goyal added, should be hands-on enough to work independently in Figma. The underlying philosophy, he wrote, is that Temple should be built by people who “wear what they build” and “hate it until it’s perfect,” showing the extreme physical demands of the users they aim to serve.

We're recruiting at @temple.At Temple, we are building the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes. A device that measures what no other wearable in the world measures, with a level of precision that doesn't exist yet.To build it, we need people who are obsessive… pic.twitter.com/iCHaMUwdEw

— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) February 27, 2026

While some on social media praised the clarity of expectations and the emphasis on founder–product alignment, others questioned whether body-fat thresholds are appropriate in hiring. A user said, “Rare to see a company align product ambition with personal standards so explicitly. When builders become primary users, iteration becomes ruthless and that’s where real breakthroughs happen.”

What is Temple?

Temple is a next-generation wearable technology company focused on elite performance athletes. The startup is building a device that claims to measure physiological and neural signals no existing wearable can, combining high-precision sensors, embedded AI, computer vision, and brain–computer interface research. The goal is reportedly to create a deeply integrated performance system spanning body, brain, and recovery designed by people who push their own physical limits as hard as the athletes they serve. The device which was seen on Deepinder Goyal.