Engineering Manager - Spark
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 Engineering Managers to lead engineering effort on Supabase Spark. Supabase Spark is an initiative to build the next frontier of agentic databases, supporting billions of databases, with millions of databases created every day.
Although we don’t require managers to contribute to code directly, we do expect you to participate in design discussions and to be involved in setting the bar for engineering quality and best practices.
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 engineering teams at a cloud, SaaS, or developer tools company.
- Experience with developer tools or databases, plus if that includes both SQLite and Postgres ecosystems.
- Strong technical credibility in backend and database systems: APIs, auth, and Postgres access control (roles, grants, RLS) etc.
- Has led a team shipping a developer facing API or platform product from early stage to production.
- 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. Focused on helping individuals achieve more than they could alone, not on being the best technical voice in the room.
- Coach rather than direct. Remove blockers, connect people to context and resources, 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 and how you navigated them.
- Are comfortable with ambiguity and capable of building structure where there isn't much.
- Communicate clearly and write well. You're default async, default written, set context proactively, and surface risks early.
- Are collaborative, low-ego, and adaptable. You thrive working with high-autonomy, senior ICs who have strong technical opinions and don't need to be the smartest person in the room.
- Are comfortable with aggressive scoping and eval driven development.