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Supabase is hiring experienced performance engineers to identify and deliver measurable performance improvements across its Postgres development platform stack. You'll join a newly formed performance team as one of its first members, working alongside a seasoned performance engineer with the team growing to approximately six people this year.
In this role, you'll find bottlenecks in live production systems and characterize them with precision so owning teams can act independently. You'll partner closely with database teams (Multigres, OrioleDB) and infrastructure teams to land concrete performance improvements. You'll build, communicate, and evolve performance methodologies and tooling that transform live production data into actionable insights.
Key responsibilities include partnering with the observability team to capture the right signals and establish a unified view of platform performance across latency, throughput, and tail behavior; helping teams self-serve performance analysis; and making performance a first-class engineering concern.
Example problems you might tackle: tuning kernel paging behavior to production workloads, reducing memory overhead in OrioleDB and Multigres, identifying and eliminating latency spike sources from application to kernel level, and identifying scalability bottlenecks across the entire stack.
You should have deep experience in performance engineering and performance analysis of complex distributed systems. You can walk the entire stack—following tail-latency problems from query optimizer through syscall boundary to IO scheduler, or across pooler hops, network paths, and availability zones, reading profiles and traces at every layer. You have depth in at least one area: Linux kernel internals (virtual memory, scheduling, networking, IO) or database internals (query planning, storage engines, buffer and WAL management).
You possess strong working knowledge of networking and cloud infrastructure performance, including TCP behavior under load, network virtualization overhead, and AWS primitives (EBS throughput/IOPS, instance network limits, placement groups, cross-AZ latency). You've proven ability to turn performance insights into real product and architecture improvements and can get teams you don't belong to prioritize and ship fixes. Strong written communication is essential—your problem characterizations are precise, reproducible, and compelling. You have a pragmatic, tooling-oriented mindset and comfort working across product, infra, and database teams.
