Engineering Manager, Realtime at Supabase

About Supabase

Supabase is the Postgres development platform, built by developers for developers. We provide a complete backend solution that includes Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector Search. All of our services are deeply integrated and designed to scale.

About the Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Realtime team at Supabase. Realtime enables developers to send low latency messages between clients, track and synchronize user state, and listen to database changes through three features: Broadcast, Presence, and Postgres Changes. Broadcast also sends from the database and over HTTP, and clients can replay recent messages. Realtime is a globally distributed Elixir cluster built on Phoenix. The team balances low latency, fair limits between projects, and the cost of running the service. Because customers expect connections to stay up, reliability matters just as much as new features.

This is a people, delivery, and technical role. You will not be expected to write production code, but you will lead a team of experienced engineers. We do expect you to join design discussions and help set the bar for engineering quality, testing, and operations.

What You Will Be Responsible For

Team and People

• Build a healthy, high trust team culture in a remote first, globally distributed environment.
• Run 1:1s, performance management, career development, and onboarding for your direct reports.
• Handle people admin such as leave and time off for your team.

Hiring

• Own the hiring plan for your team and act as Hiring Manager and first round interviewer for all roles on the team.
• Partner with Talent Acquisition to source, interview, and close strong candidates.
• Contribute to headcount planning, org design, and the evolution of engineering leadership at Supabase.

Delivery and Roadmap

• Own the team roadmap and project management in Linear, driving accountability and clear milestones.
• Manage workflow intake and Slack triage, the team's primary inboxes for cross team requests. You decide what gets routed where, prioritized, or pushed back on.
• Own weekly updates and keep stakeholders aligned without creating overhead.
• Organize effort against support tickets and maintain the team SLO.
• Surface risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early and clearly to leadership.

Incident Commander

• Train as an Incident Commander and drive coordination, resolution, and post incident follow up.
• Lead blameless post incident reviews.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

• Have 5+ years of engineering background with enough depth to be credible with engineers building complex systems.
• Have 3+ years managing remote engineering teams.
• Have managed a team that built and ran a low latency, high connection service such as WebSockets, pub/sub, messaging, presence, or streaming systems.
• Have strong technical credibility in distributed systems, including clustering, rate limiting, backpressure, and capacity planning.
• Have led a team through production incidents on a customer facing service, ran the follow up work, and kept the review blameless.
• Understand what developers need from a real time API or SDK and have shipped one to customers outside your company.
• Have experience with Elixir, Erlang, or BEAM (a plus, not required).
• Have experience with Postgres logical replication and Row Level Security (a plus, not required).
• Have managed remote, globally distributed teams working asynchronously across disparate time zones.
• Are technical enough to be credible with strong engineers but genuinely passionate about people management. This is the work you want to do, not a track you are settling for.
• Build psychological safety and a feedback culture by giving feedback often and in the moment, asking for it back, and creating space for the team to do the same.
• Operate as a multiplier, helping individuals achieve more than they could alone without needing to be the best technical voice in the room.
• Coach rather than direct, removing blockers, connecting people to context, and trusting engineers to own how the work gets done.
• Have a real track record of performance management and can speak to specific examples of difficult conversations.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and can build structure where there is not much.
• Communicate clearly and write well, defaulting to async and written communication, setting context early, and surfacing risks early.
• Are collaborative, low ego, and adaptable, thriving with high autonomy senior engineers.

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: We hire globally and 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 so everyone shares in the upside of what we are building together.
• Tech Allowance: Use this budget to set up your ideal work environment with a 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 such as courses, books, or conferences.

About the Team

Supabase was born remote and open source first. We believe our globally distributed team is our secret weapon in building tools developers love.

• About 400 team members
• Team members in 60+ countries
• 20+ languages spoken
• Over $1B raised, including a $500M Series F
• 540,000+ community members

We move fast, build in public, and use what we ship. We believe deeply in the open source ecosystem and strive to support, not replace, existing tools and communities.