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. Those three features are 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. 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 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’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

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 admin (leave, time off, etc.) for your team.

Hiring

• Own the hiring plan for your team and act as Hiring Manager. First round of 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 & Roadmap

• Own the team's roadmap and project management (Linear), driving accountability and clear milestones.
• Manage workflow intake and Slack triage. These are the team’s primary inboxes for cross-team requests. You decide what gets routed where, prioritized, or pushed back on.
• 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. 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. Examples are WebSockets, pub/sub, messaging, presence or streaming systems.
• Have strong technical credibility in distributed systems. We look for clustering, rate limiting, backpressure and capacity planning.
• Have led a team through production incidents on a customer-facing service. You 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 (not required but a plus).
• Have experience with Postgres logical replication and Row Level Security (not required but a plus).
• Have managed remote, globally distributed teams that work 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're settling for.
• Build psychological safety and a feedback culture. You give feedback often and in the moment, ask for it back, and create space for the team to do the same.
• Operate as a multiplier. You help individuals achieve more than they could alone, and you don't need to be the best technical voice in the room.
• Coach rather than direct. You remove blockers, connect people to context, and trust your 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 isn't much.
• Communicate clearly and write well. You default to async and written, set context early, and surface risks early.
• Are collaborative, low-ego and adaptable. You thrive with high-autonomy senior engineers who don't need you to be the smartest person in the room.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Fully Remote

We hire globally. We 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 ESOP (equity ownership) in the company. …