Senior Performance Engineer at Supabase | Founding Team in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Joining a founding team member of a new function is a rare career accelerator. Supabase is explicitly building its performance team from scratch — no legacy process, no inherited debt. As one of the first ~six members, you'll have disproportionate influence over methodology, tooling choices, and how performance is communicated company-wide. That kind of ownership is typically only available at early-stage startups, not a $1B+ funded scale-up.
Skills you'll develop and sharpen:
- Distributed systems benchmarking at scale — highly transferable to any cloud-native company.
- Deep Postgres internals via collaboration with Multigres and OrioleDB teams — a niche and increasingly valuable specialization as Postgres adoption grows.
- Cross-functional technical leadership: influencing product, infra, and database engineers without direct authority.
- Public-facing performance reporting — builds a credible portfolio and external reputation.
Market positioning: Performance engineering is a scarce discipline. Senior practitioners with distributed systems + database depth command $160K–$240K+ at top-tier tech companies. This role likely sits at the high end of that range given the funding and team seniority.
Green flags: Async culture, no micromanagement, strong open-source ethos, education budget, and equity participation. The open-source-first DNA means your work will likely be visible externally — a career asset.
One watch point: Small new team means you'll need to be self-directing. If you prefer structured processes and clear escalation paths, the "no legacy process" aspect may require adjustment.
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 This Role
We're hiring experienced performance engineers to make performance measurement at Supabase rigorous, repeatable, and actionable by product teams. This role owns the benchmarking and profiling systems we use to detect regressions, explain performance changes, and publish credible numbers for customers and the market. You'll build the tooling and the methodology and make it easy for product teams to use it correctly.
You'd join a new performance team as one of its first members, working alongside a deeply seasoned performance engineer, with the team growing to roughly six this year. There's no legacy process to inherit — you'll help define how we measure and communicate performance metrics at Supabase.
What You'll Do
Build and evolve benchmarking, profiling, and load-testing tooling (cloud, database, and end-to-end).
Define benchmark suites and reference workloads that reflect real customer behavior (and evolve them as the products change).
Establish performance baselines and regression gates across products (variance tracking, environment control, and detection of changes).
Build mechanisms that turn benchmark results into action: triage workflows, owner routing, and clear, reproducible reports.
Partner closely with database teams (e.g. Multigres, OrioleDB) to identify bottlenecks and land concrete performance improvements.
Enable the company to publish credible, repeatable performance numbers for customers and the market.
Help teams self-serve performance testing and make performance a first-class engineering concern.
Problems You Might Work On
Build continuous benchmarking infrastructure so product teams can spot performance regressions early. Ideally, teams can run benchmarks directly on PRs or locally while developing a feature.
Analyze and eliminate issues with load generators, workloads, or benchmark environments to ensure that benchmarks are reliable indicators for actual product performance.
Build regression triage tooling that pinpoints what changed (diffing, profiles/traces, query-level attribution).
Help product teams analyze the root cause of performance regressions in benchmark environments themselves.
What We're Looking For
Deep experience in performance engineering, benchmarking, and profiling of complex distributed systems. Specifically, you have owned benchmarking systems where reproducibility and controlling variance mattered.
Strong systems intuition (databases, storage, networking, cloud infrastructure).
Comfortable working across product, infra, and database teams.
Pragmatic, tooling-oriented mindset with strong communication skills.
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).
What We Offer
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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.
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ESOP
Every team member receives ESOP (equity ownership) in the company. We want everyone to share in the upside of what we're building together.
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Tech Allowance
Use this budget to set up your ideal work environment — laptop, monitor, headphones, or whatever helps you do your best work.
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Health Benefits
Supabase covers 100% of health insurance for employees and 80% for dependents, wherever you are. Your wellbeing and your family's health are important to us.
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Annual Off-Sites
Once a year, the entire company gathers in a new city for a week of connection, collaboration, and fun. It's a highlight of our year.
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Flexible Work
We operate asynchronously and trust you to manage your own time. You know what needs to be done and when.
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Professional Development
Every team member receives an annual education allowance to spend on learning — courses, books, conferences, or anything that supports your growth.
About the Team
Supabase was born-remote and open-source-first. We believe our globally distributed team is our secret weapon in building tools developers love.
~400 team members
60+ countries
20+ languages spoken
Over $1B raised (including our $500M Series F)
540,000+ community members
We move fast, build in public, and use what we ship. If it's in your project, we probably use it in ours too. We believe deeply in the open-source ecosystem and strive to support — not replace — existing tools and communities.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role truly remote with no location restrictions?
What does it mean to be one of the first members of the performance team?
What technical background is required for this role?
Is there salary information available for this position?
Does Supabase offer equity to all employees?
