Head of Observability

Supabase Supabase · Data AI · Remote · Engineering

Head of Observability to define and execute the observability strategy for Supabase, covering logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and profiling. This includes owning the internal platform for incident response and reliability, as well as the customer-facing product for developer visibility. The role involves evaluating tooling, making build-vs-buy decisions, and charting technical direction. Responsibilities include defining SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, capacity planning, and collaborating with engineering teams to embed instrumentation. The role also involves building and leading an observability engineering team and owning the reliability, performance, scaling, and efficiency of observability infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and execute the observability strategy for Supabase, covering logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and profiling
  2. Own the customer-facing observability experience including dashboards, logs explorer, metrics, alerts — and work with Product to make it best-in-class for developers
  3. Build and lead a world-class observability engineering team. Set the bar for hiring, mentorship, and technical excellence
  4. Orchestrate and scale high-throughput data pipelines for telemetry ingestion, storage, and querying
  5. Own the reliability, performance, scaling, and efficiency of observability infrastructure

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of engineering experience
  • 3+ years leading or managing teams
  • Experience building, significantly evolving, or operating an observability platform at scale
  • Deep technical understanding of logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, dashboarding
  • Experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, or similar, at production scale
  • Clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity and make high-stakes technical decisions

Nice to have

  • Experience building customer-facing observability products
  • Experience with Elixir/Erlang in production
  • Contributed to open source observability projects
  • Experience at a company that dogfoods its own observability tooling

What the JD emphasized

  • built or significantly scaled an observability platform at a devtools company, hyperscaler, or high-scale tech company
  • deeply technical across the observability stack: logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, dashboarding
  • hands-on experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, or similar, at production scale