Pre-Sales Solutions Architect Leader at Supabase

About Supabase

Supabase provides a comprehensive Postgres development platform, designed by developers for developers. It offers a complete backend solution encompassing Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector Search, with all services deeply integrated and optimized for growth.

About the Role

The Pre-Sales Solutions Architect (SA) Leader is responsible for the overall health, strategic direction, and performance of the Solutions Architecture function. While individual SAs manage the technical aspects of sales opportunities, the SA Leader is directly accountable for the technical win rate and deal velocity across the entire pre-sales motion, including all supported channels and the team delivering against them.

This role is a player-coach position, carrying direct responsibility for channel coverage, managing the most strategic or high stakes evaluations, and ensuring cross-functional go-to-market alignment. A significant portion of time will be dedicated to developing individual SAs, fostering a proactive and commercially astute approach that scales effectively.

Compensation Note: The SA Leader's compensation is directly tied to team-wide ARR bookings (new logos, expansions, and multi-year commitments) across every SA's pipeline, not just personal deals. The Leader is expected to maintain a commercial mindset at a portfolio scale.

Core Responsibilities

People Leadership & Team Development

The SA Leader hires, coaches, and develops the SA team, ensuring each member acts as a credible, commercially sharp technical partner throughout the sales cycle. Key responsibilities include:

• Hiring and onboarding new SAs, including calibration against channel-specific technical evaluation prompts.
• Conducting regular one-on-ones, reviewing deal strategy, Proof of Concept (PoC) scoping, and objection handling, providing direct feedback.
• Building and maintaining repeatable playbooks, such as discovery frameworks, PoC templates, objection/RFP responses, and competitive positioning, to ensure consistent quality.
• Setting and upholding a high standard for the team's technical depth, commercial instinct, and quota attainment.

Channel & Coverage Ownership

The SA Leader manages the coverage model for the entire function, deciding, tracking, and rebalancing SA assignments across channels, and addressing gaps as pipeline shifts. This includes accountability across all five channels outlined in the SA Channel Mapping:

• Direct Sales (AMER, EMEA, APJ)
• Hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI)
• Accelerators, Incubators, VCs (YCombinator, TechStars, 500 Startups)
• SfP + OAuth Partners (Lovable, Bolt, Anthropic)
• Solution Providers (Postgres.ai, Stormatics)
• Rebalancing SA assignments as pipeline volume, deal complexity, or new partner motions evolve.
• Resolving coverage gaps (e.g., channels lacking SA depth or regions outgrowing current allocations) and determining appropriate solutions like new hires, cross-channel reassignments, or controlled exceptions.
• Approving which opportunities warrant direct Leader-level involvement versus remaining with the assigned SA.

Technical Sales Ownership (oversight)

The SA Leader ensures that every significant opportunity has a clear, accountable technical owner responsible for architecture fit, use cases, evaluation criteria, and competitive positioning. This involves spot-checking deal documentation and risk tracking across the pipeline, and directly engaging in the largest or most strategic evaluations.

Discovery and Technical Qualification (oversight)

The SA Leader ensures the team consistently qualifies opportunities as technically winnable early in the process. This involves coaching SAs on discovery quality and holding the team accountable for proactively communicating deal-level risks to Account Executives (AEs) and sales leadership before they impact deals.

Proof of Concept and Evaluation Support (oversight)

The SA Leader ensures that PoCs across the team are scoped to demonstrate differentiated value, moving beyond mere technical box-checking. This includes auditing success criteria, evaluation structure, and win rate patterns across all active evaluations.

Technical Objection Handling (oversight)

The SA Leader serves as the escalation point for the most challenging architecture, security, or compliance objections, stepping in on RFPs, security questionnaires, and competitive deals that might stall without senior technical input, while the SA remains the primary technical contact.

Commercial Technical Alignment (oversight)

The SA Leader ensures the team consistently links technical requirements to commercial outcomes throughout the pipeline, and personally engages in pricing/packaging justification and expansion strategy for the largest deals.

Internal Collaboration

Sales (Account Executives)

The SA Leader collaborates with Sales leadership to ensure effective SA/AE pairing at the portfolio level, owning the technical narrative while sales leadership manages the commercial motion. The Leader personally intervenes when specific SA/AE partnerships require adjudication.

Partnerships

The SA Leader works with Partner Leads across all channels (Hyperscalers, Accelerators, SfP+OAuth, Solution Providers) to ensure SA support scales with each channel's motion, while commercial terms and channel strategy remain with the Partner Lead.

Engineering and Product

The SA Leader aggregates market signals, identifying recurring technical blockers or roadmap gaps across deals that impact the team's ability to close, prioritizing these over one-off issues for Engineering and Product teams.

Technical Account Management (TAM) and Customer Engineering

The SA Leader ensures consistent handoff quality from pre-sales to post-sales, auditing that architectural decisions, commitments, and open items are well documented, enabling TAMs and CEs to drive early adoption efficiently.

Success Metrics

SA Leader effectiveness is measured by commercial and technical outcomes across the entire team:

• Team ARR Bookings: New logo and expansion ARR across every SA's pipeline, relative to team quota.
• Deal Velocity: Time from technical qualification to technical win, tracked across channels.
• PoC Win Rate: Percentage of structured evaluations converting to closed-won, team-wide.
• Pipeline Coverage: Volume and quality of SA-engaged opportunities relative to quota, per channel.
• Handoff Quality: Post-sales team satisfaction with documentation and deal context across the team.
• Team Health: Ramp time to productivity for new SAs and retention of the SA team.

Tools Used by the SA Team

This section outlines the tools and systems utilized by the Solutions Architecture team, kept current as tooling evolves:

• HubSpot
• Hex
• AdminConsole
• Grafana

Scope of Coverage

The SA Leader is responsible for technical pre-sales coverage across all channels supported by the function:

1. Direct Sales (AMER, EMEA, APJ)
2. Hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI)
3. Accelerators, Incubators, VCs (YCombinator, TechStars, 500 Startups)
4. SfP + OAuth Partners (Lovable, Bolt, Anthropic)
5. Solution Providers (Postgres.ai, Stormatics)

Each channel requires distinct selling motions and technical paths to success; the SA Leader ensures the team's channel assignments and playbooks adapt to pipeline movement.

What SA Leaders Do Not Do

To maintain focus and scalability, the SA Leader does not:

• Own post-sales technical delivery or ongoing account management, which remains with TAM/CE.
• Perform implementation or professional services work outside of formal PoCs.
• Take over account health monitoring.
• Independently set or negotiate commercial terms without the AE or Partner Lead.
• Replace the individual SA as a deal's primary technical contact; the Leader escalates in, they do not take over.

Ideal Individual

A world-class SA Leader at Supabase has a proven track record as an individual SA, demonstrating deep technical expertise, commercial acumen, and genuine curiosity about customer building practices, and now seeks to multiply these qualities across a team.

• Technical depth: Able to design production grade architectures during discovery calls, debug PoCs, and instantly earn credibility with CTOs.
• People leadership: Experienced in hiring, coaching, and growing technical sales teams, providing direct, specific feedback, and developing SAs into future leaders.
• Channel-level judgment: Capable of assessing all five channels to identify thin coverage, shifting channel dynamics, and areas to reallocate SA attention.
• Commercial instinct at scale: Thinks in terms of team-wide ARR bookings, not just personal quota; understands which deals warrant Leader-level involvement.
• Expansion mindset: Coaches SAs to proactively identify new teams, workloads, and use cases for account growth, and applies this personally to large deals.
• Communication range: Equally adept at whiteboarding with senior engineers, coaching SAs through escalations, and briefing sales leadership on pipeline health.
• Internal leverage: Transforms competitive patterns, objection responses, and architecture templates from individual deals into scalable team playbooks.
• Quota attainment (team): Proven track record of personally carrying and closing a pre-sales quota, plus experience being accountable for a team's aggregate number.
• Experience: Has built something in production, comes from an engineering, founding, or hands-on technical background, and has led a technical, customer facing team.

Summary

The Pre-Sales Solutions Architect Leader's primary objective is to ensure that every channel the SA function supports (Direct Sales, Hyperscalers, Accelerators, SfP+OAuth Partners, and Solution Providers) has the necessary technical coverage to win deals, and that the team delivering against these channels continuously improves.

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: We hire globally, believing that you can do your best work from anywhere. There are no Supabase offices, but we provide a WeWork membership or co-working allowance for use worldwide.
• ESOP: Every team member receives equity ownership in the company, ensuring everyone shares in the success we build together.
• Tech Allowance: Utilize this budget to establish your ideal work environment, covering laptops, monitors, headphones, or other tools to enhance productivity.
• Health Benefits: Supabase covers 100% of health insurance for employees and 80% for dependents, wherever you are, prioritizing your wellbeing and family's health.
• Annual Off-Sites: Once a year, the entire company gathers in a new city for a week focused on connection, collaboration, and enjoyment, a highlight of our year.
• Flexible Work: We operate asynchronously, trusting you to manage your time effectively, knowing what needs to be done and when.
• Professional Development: Each team member receives an annual education allowance for learning, including courses, books, conferences, or anything supporting personal growth.

About the Team

Supabase was founded as a remote first and open source first company. Our globally distributed team is considered a key asset in building tools that developers love.

• Approximately 400 team members
• Present in over 60 countries
• Speaking more than 20 languages
• Over $1 billion raised (including a $500 million Series F)
• Over 540,000 community members

We work rapidly, build in public, and utilize our own products. If it is in your project, we likely use it in ours. We deeply believe in the open source ecosystem and aim to support, not replace, existing tools and communities.