Engineering Manager - Realtime

About the role

Leads the Realtime team at Supabase, covering Broadcast, Presence and Postgres Changes on a globally distributed Elixir cluster, and owns the team's people, hiring, delivery and incident response. Suits engineering leaders with 5+ years of engineering background and 3+ years managing remote teams, who have run low-latency, high-connection or distributed systems.

What you'll do

• Build a healthy, high-trust team culture in a remote-first, globally distributed environment.
• Run 1:1s, performance management, career development and onboarding for direct reports.
• Handle people admin such as leave and time off for the team.
• Own the team's hiring plan and act as Hiring Manager, including first-round interviews for all team roles.
• Partner with Talent Acquisition to source, interview and close candidates.
• Contribute to headcount planning, org design and the evolution of engineering leadership.
• 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, deciding routing, priority and pushback.
• Own the team's weekly updates and keep stakeholders aligned.
• Organize effort against support tickets and maintain the team's SLO.
• Surface risks, dependencies and tradeoffs early to leadership.
• Train as an Incident Commander and drive coordination, resolution and post-incident follow-up.
• Lead blameless post-incident reviews.
• Join design discussions and help set the bar for engineering quality, testing and operations.
• Drive employee feedback culture by giving feedback often and in the moment and creating space for team feedback.
• Remove blockers, connect people to context and trust engineers to own how work gets done.
• Act as a people, delivery and technical leader who sets the bar for engineering quality, testing and operations.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of engineering background, with enough depth to be credible with engineers building complex systems.
• 3+ years managing remote engineering teams.
• Experience managing a team that built and ran a low-latency, high-connection service, such as WebSockets, pub/sub, messaging, presence or streaming systems.
• Strong technical credibility in distributed systems, including clustering, rate limiting, backpressure and capacity planning.
• Experience leading a team through production incidents on a customer-facing service, running follow-up work and keeping reviews blameless.
• Understanding of what developers need from a real-time API or SDK, with experience shipping one to customers outside the company.
• Experience managing remote, globally distributed teams working asynchronously across time zones.
• Strong interest in people management as the primary work, not a fallback track.
• Track record of performance management with specific examples of difficult conversations.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to build structure where little exists.
• Clear written and verbal communication, defaulting to async and surfacing risks early.
• Collaborative, low-ego and adaptable, coaching rather than directing.
• Ability to give and ask for feedback to build psychological safety and a feedback culture.
• Ability to act as a multiplier who helps individuals achieve more than they could alone.

Nice to have

• Experience with Elixir, Erlang or BEAM.
• Experience with Postgres logical replication and Row Level Security.

Benefits listed by Supabase

• Fully remote work with a WeWork membership or co-working allowance
• ESOP (equity ownership) for every team member
• Tech allowance for work equipment
• 100% health insurance coverage for employees and 80% for dependents
• Annual company off-site
• Flexible, asynchronous work arrangements
• Annual education allowance

Tools & skills mentioned