Engineering Manager - Realtime

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.

About the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Realtime team at Supabase. Realtime lets developers send low-latency messages between clients, track and synchronize user state, and listen to database changes (Broadcast, Presence, and Postgres Changes).

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. Customers expect connections to stay up, so reliability matters as much as new features.

The Engineering Manager is a people, delivery, and technical role. We don't expect you to write production code, but you will lead a team of experienced engineers, join design discussions, and help set the bar for engineering quality, testing, and operations.

Key Responsibilities

Team & 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 administration (leave, time off, etc.) for your team.

Hiring

• Own the hiring plan for your team and act as Hiring Manager (first round interviewer for all team roles).
• 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 & Roadmap

• Own the team's roadmap and project management in Linear, driving accountability and clear milestones.
• Manage workflow intake and Slack triage for cross-team requests, prioritizing or routing appropriately.
• Own the team's weekly updates and keep stakeholders aligned without creating overhead.
• Organize effort against support tickets and maintain the team's SLO.
• Surface risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early and clearly to leadership.

Incident Commander

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

Requirements & Qualifications

• Technical Depth: 5+ years of engineering background with enough depth to be credible with senior engineers building complex, distributed systems (clustering, rate limiting, backpressure, capacity planning).
• Leadership Experience: 3+ years managing remote engineering teams asynchronously across disparate time zones.
• Domain Expertise: Experience managing a team that built and operated a low-latency, high-connection service (WebSockets, pub/sub, messaging, presence, or streaming systems).
• Production Incidents: Track record of leading teams through production incidents on customer-facing services with blameless post-mortems.
• API/SDK Experience: Understanding of what developers need from a real-time API or SDK, ideally having shipped one to external customers.
• Management Mindset: Passionate about people management, coaching, feedback, and performance management rather than viewing management as a step up from coding.
• Communication: Excellent written and async communication skills with a default to transparency and context-setting.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Elixir, Erlang, or the BEAM ecosystem.
• Experience with Postgres logical replication and Row Level Security (RLS).

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: Work from anywhere in the world. We provide a WeWork membership or co-working allowance.
• Equity (ESOP): Share in the upside of what we are building together.
• Tech Allowance: Budget for your ideal work environment setup (laptop, monitor, headphones, etc.).
• Health Benefits: 100% health insurance coverage for employees and 80% for dependents globally.
• Annual Off-Sites: Gathering the entire company in a new city once a year for collaboration and fun.
• Flexible Work: Asynchronous operation with trust to manage your own time.
• Professional Development: Annual education allowance for courses, books, and conferences.

About the Team

Supabase was born-remote and open-source-first.

• ~400 team members across 60+ countries speaking 20+ languages
• Over $1B raised (including Series F)
• 540,000+ community members