Container Platform Engineer at Supabase

About Supabase

Supabase is a Postgres development platform built by developers, for developers. It provides a full backend suite including Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector Search, all deeply integrated and designed to scale. More than 9 million developers and 250,000+ customers build on Supabase, and most new databases on the platform come from AI app builders, so the underlying systems must stay reliable while growing quickly.

About the Role

Container Engineering (ConEng) owns the internal container platform that runs Supabase's multi tenant, multi region services. This is the managed Kubernetes platform that other engineering teams build and deploy on top of. The team owns cluster lifecycle and cluster classes, multi cluster and multi region topology, capacity, scheduling, isolation and runtime safety, higher level platform APIs, the Kubernetes deployment contract and Argo semantics, rollout primitives, and runtime configuration and secret injection.

Your job is to make the platform itself trustworthy, observable, and cheap to operate at scale, and to raise the reliability bar for everyone who depends on it. This is not a gatekeeper role: you will make the reliable path the easy path by building the automation and platform APIs that let product teams run safely by default, instrumenting what the team operates, and ensuring fast detection and recovery when something breaks.

The work spans three strength areas:

• Tooling and ecosystem: deep knowledge of the container and orchestration landscape (Kubernetes, containerd/OCI, the CNCF ecosystem) and a clear point of view on how to compose it.
• Software engineering: designing and building the platform's automation, controllers, and internal tooling as production code, including solutions that are not pre shaped by an existing tool.
• Operational / SRE practice: the discipline of SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and ORRs that runs the platform at scale predictably.

You should be genuinely deep in at least one of these areas, and many of the strongest candidates are deep in two (usually leaning toward one). Strength across all three is rare and exceptional, and even then no one is equally strong in all three at once, so you would focus where most needed at any given time. Different profiles are welcome; tell us which of these is your center of gravity.

What You'll Be Responsible For

Regardless of skill set, all team members carry a share of the team's on call rota, responding to platform incidents and driving them to resolution and follow up.

Platform reliability and operations

• Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for the container platform itself, and build error budget policies that gate platform changes.
• Own the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) process for new platform capabilities and major changes.
• Design and track metrics for platform uptime, and increase observability into the platform by capturing the right metrics, logs, and traces across platform layers.
• Drive the incident to improvement pipeline: facilitate blameless postmortems, connect findings to readiness gaps, spot repeat failure patterns, and push through systemic fixes.

Software engineering

• Build and maintain the platform's automation, controllers, operators, and internal tooling, writing and shipping production code rather than just wiring together existing tools.
• Design and implement platform side CI/CD and rollout primitives that speed up platform deployments while working within proper change and release management.
• Implement and maintain security automation for the platform: intrusion detection, automated remediation, and patch management.
• Identify and quantify operational toil, and build the automation that removes it rather than just documenting it.
• Contribute to the platform's continual testing automation: the test suites and pipelines that validate platform releases are fit for purpose before they reach tenants.

Tooling, ecosystem and architecture

• Act as a platform reliability and architecture expert, contributing to failure mode analysis, dependency mapping, and resilience design for multi tenant container workloads.
• Evaluate and evolve the platform's tooling ecosystem (orchestration, runtime, networking, isolation, and observability stack) with a clear, opinionated view on trade offs.
• Improve system architecture to reduce infrastructure cost while balancing security, reliability, and performance across tenants.
• Guide teams building on the platform to design sustainable on call practices for their own services: alert quality, escalation paths, runbook coverage, and noise reduction.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 5+ years in platform engineering, container/Kubernetes platform operations, SRE, or production infrastructure, and have operated production systems at scale and carried on call for them.
• Are genuinely deep in at least one, ideally two, of the three strength areas below (and tell us which is your center of gravity):
  • Tooling and ecosystem: know the container/orchestration landscape well, including Kubernetes, containerd and the OCI/CRI standards, and the surrounding CNCF ecosystem (e.g. Argo CD/Argo Rollouts for GitOps and progressive delivery; Cilium/eBPF networking and the Gateway API; Karpenter/KEDA style autoscaling; and workload isolation runtimes such as gVisor or Kata Containers). You reason about trade offs rather than reaching for defaults.
  • Software engineering: write real production code (Go and/or a comparable systems language) and can build controllers, operators, and platform APIs, stepping back to the underlying problem and building the right solution when no off the shelf tool fits.
  • Operational / SRE practice: are fluent in SLOs, error budgets, and operational KPIs; have led incident response and blameless postmortems; and have driven down MTTD/MTTR for systems you operated.
• Have worked with large scale multi tenant systems and understand isolation as a spectrum, from namespaces, RBAC, network policies, and resource quotas through to stronger primitives such as virtual clusters (e.g. vCluster) or VM class runtimes.
• Operate confidently on AWS (multiple accounts, IAM, VPC) and are comfortable with infrastructure as code (Pulumi preferred; Terraform/CDK also fine) and Kubernetes.
• Script and automate to eliminate toil rather than absorb it.
• Communicate clearly with both infrastructure specialists and product engineers, and thrive in async, globally distributed teams.
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and iterating toward better systems over time.

Nice to Have

• Experience building and operating a multi tenant Kubernetes platform that internal teams deploy onto.
• Familiarity with policy engines (Kyverno, or OPA/Gatekeeper) and cost attribution tooling (OpenCost/Kubecost) for per tenant chargeback/showback.
• Experience with managed database platforms or Postgres.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, or similar observability tooling.

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: We hire globally. We believe you can do your best work from anywhere. There are no Supabase offices, but we provide a WeWork membership or co working allowance you can use anywhere in the world.
• ESOP: Every team member receives equity ownership in the company. We want everyone to share in the upside of what we are building together.
• Tech Allowance: Use this budget to set up your ideal work environment: laptop, monitor, headphones, or whatever helps you do your best work.
• Health Benefits: Supabase covers 100% of health insurance for employees and 80% for dependents, wherever you are.
• Annual Off Sites: Once a year, the entire company gathers in a new city for a week of connection, collaboration, and fun.
• Flexible Work: We operate asynchronously and trust you to manage your own time.
• Professional Development: Every team member receives an annual education allowance to spend on learning: courses, books, conferences, or anything that supports your growth.

About the Team

Supabase was born remote and open source first. The team believes its globally distributed team is a secret weapon in building tools developers love. The company has around 400 team members across 60+ countries speaking 20+ languages, with over $1B raised (including a $500M Series F) and 540,000+ community members. The team moves fast, builds in public, and uses what it ships, and it deeply believes in the open source ecosystem, striving to support rather than replace existing tools and communities.