Performance Engineer - Performance Analysis & Tuning

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 hiring experienced performance engineers to find and land performance wins across the Supabase stack — from the query optimizer to block device level, and across the network paths and cloud infrastructure that connect our distributed platform. This is a performance delivery role: real, measured improvements to our database, platform, and APIs as we scale toward enterprise and platform-grade workloads.

You'd join a new performance team as one of its first members, working alongside a deeply seasoned performance engineer. There's no legacy process to inherit — you'll help define how performance engineering works at Supabase.

What You'll Do

• Find bottlenecks in live production systems and characterize them precisely enough that the owning team can act on them.
• Partner closely with database teams (e.g., Multigres, OrioleDB) and infra teams to land concrete performance improvements.
• Build, communicate, and evolve performance methodologies and tooling that turn live production data into actionable insight.
• Partner with the observability team to capture the right signals and establish a unified view of platform performance (latency, throughput, tail behavior) across products.
• Help teams self-serve performance analysis and make performance a first-class engineering concern.

Problems You Might Work On

• Tune the kernel's paging behavior to production workloads.
• Reduce memory overhead in OrioleDB and Multigres.
• Identify and eliminate sources of latency spikes from application to kernel level.
• Identify scalability bottlenecks across the entire stack and work with the appropriate teams to resolve them.

What We're Looking For

• Deep experience in performance engineering, specifically performance analysis of complex distributed systems.
• Ability to walk the whole stack: follow a tail-latency problem from the query optimizer through the syscall boundary to the IO scheduler.
• Depth on at least one end of the stack: Linux kernel internals (virtual memory, scheduling, networking, IO) or database internals (query planning, storage engines, buffer and WAL management).
• Strong working knowledge of networking and cloud infrastructure performance (TCP behavior, network virtualization, AWS primitives like EBS throughput/IOPS).
• Proven ability to turn performance insights into real product and architecture improvements.
• Strong written communication: your problem characterizations are precise, reproducible, and compelling.
• Pragmatic, tooling-oriented mindset.

What We Offer

• Fully Remote: We hire globally. We provide a WeWork membership or co-working allowance.
• ESOP: Every team member receives equity ownership in the company.
• Tech Allowance: Budget to set up your ideal work environment.
• Health Benefits: 100% coverage for employees and 80% for dependents.
• Annual Off-Sites: The entire company gathers in a new city once a year.
• Flexible Work: Asynchronous culture where we trust you to manage your own time.
• Professional Development: Annual education allowance for learning and growth.