Container Engineer - Supabase

About Supabase

Supabase is the Postgres development platform, built by developers for developers. We provide a complete backend solution including Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector Search. All services are deeply integrated and designed for growth. More than 9 million developers and 250,000+ customers now build on Supabase, and the majority of new databases on the platform are created by AI app builders — so the systems underneath have to stay reliable while they grow fast.

About the Role

Container Engineering (ConEng) owns the internal container platform that runs Supabase's multi-tenant, multi-region services — the managed Kubernetes platform that other engineering teams build and deploy on top of. We own cluster lifecycle and cluster classes, multi-cluster and multi-region topology, capacity, scheduling, isolation and runtime safety, the 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'll make the reliable path the easy path: building the automation and platform APIs that let product teams run safely by default, instrumenting what we operate, and making sure that when something breaks we detect it and recover fast.

The work spans three strength areas:

• Tooling & 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 don't come pre-shaped by an existing tool.
• Operational / SRE practice — the discipline (SLOs, error budgets, incident response, ORRs) that runs the platform at scale as a predictable one.

We expect you to be genuinely deep in at least one of these, and many of our strongest candidates are deep in two (usually leaning toward one). Different profiles are welcome here; tell us which of these is your center of gravity.

Responsibilities

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 & Operations

• Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for the container platform itself, building 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, increasing observability across platform layers via metrics, logs, and traces.
• Drive the incident-to-improvement pipeline: facilitate blameless postmortems, connect findings to readiness gaps, and push through systemic fixes.

Software Engineering

• Build and maintain platform automation, controllers, operators, and internal tooling in production code.
• Design and implement platform-side CI/CD and rollout primitives working within proper change and release management.
• Implement and maintain security automation: intrusion detection, automated remediation, and patch management.
• Identify and quantify operational toil, building automation to remove it.
• Contribute to continual testing automation pipelines to validate platform releases before reaching tenants.

Tooling, Ecosystem & Architecture

• Act as a platform reliability and architecture expert, contributing to failure-mode analysis, dependency mapping, and resilience design.
• Evaluate and evolve the platform's tooling ecosystem (orchestration, runtime, networking, isolation, observability) with a clear view on trade-offs.
• Improve system architecture to reduce infrastructure costs while balancing security, reliability, and performance across tenants.
• Guide internal teams to design sustainable on-call practices (alert quality, escalation paths, runbooks, noise reduction).

Requirements

• 5+ years in platform engineering, container/Kubernetes platform operations, SRE, or production infrastructure, having operated production systems at scale and carried on-call.
• Deep expertise in at least one (ideally two) core strength areas:
  • Tooling & Ecosystem: Container/orchestration landscape (Kubernetes, containerd, OCI/CRI, Argo CD/Rollouts, Cilium/eBPF, Karpenter/KEDA, gVisor/Kata Containers).
  • Software Engineering: Production code fluency (Go or comparable systems language) to build controllers, operators, and platform APIs.
  • Operational / SRE Practice: Fluency in SLOs, error budgets, incident response, blameless postmortems, and driving down MTTD/MTTR.
• Experience with large-scale multi-tenant systems and isolation primitives (namespaces, RBAC, network policies, resource quotas, vCluster, VM-class runtimes).
• Confident operation on AWS (IAM, VPC, multi-account) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Pulumi preferred, or Terraform/CDK).
• Strong scripting and automation skills to eliminate operational toil.
• Clear written/verbal communication across infrastructure and product teams in an async, globally distributed setup.

Nice to Have

• Experience building and operating multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms for internal developer teams.
• Familiarity with policy engines (Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper) and cost-attribution tooling (OpenCost/Kubecost).
• Experience with managed database platforms or Postgres.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, or similar observability tools.

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: Work from anywhere globally. Includes a WeWork membership or co-working allowance.
• ESOP: Equity ownership in the company for every team member.
• Tech Allowance: Budget to set up your ideal work environment (laptop, monitor, headphones, etc.).
• Health Benefits: 100% health insurance coverage for employees and 80% for dependents globally.
• Annual Off-Sites: Annual week-long company gathering in a new city.
• Flexible Work: Asynchronous-first culture with full trust over your schedule.
• Professional Development: Annual education allowance for courses, books, and conferences.

About the Team

Supabase was born remote and open-source first. We are a globally distributed team of ~400 members across 60+ countries, speaking 20+ languages, and backed by over $1B raised. We move fast, build in public, and actively support the open-source ecosystem.