Container Engineer

About the Role

Container Engineering (ConEng) owns the internal container platform that runs Supabase's multi-tenant, multi-region services — the managed Kubernetes platform that other engineering teams build and deploy on top of. We own cluster lifecycle and cluster classes, multi-cluster and multi-region topology, capacity, scheduling, isolation and runtime safety, higher-level platform APIs, Kubernetes deployment contracts, Argo semantics, rollout primitives, and runtime configuration and secret injection.

Your job is to make the platform trustworthy, observable, and cost-effective at scale. The work spans three core strength areas:

• Tooling & ecosystem: Deep knowledge of the container and orchestration landscape (Kubernetes, containerd/OCI, CNCF ecosystem) and how to compose it.
• Software engineering: Designing and building platform automation, controllers, and internal tooling as production code.
• Operational / SRE practice: Applying operational discipline (SLOs, error budgets, incident response, ORRs) to run the platform at scale.

What You'll Be Responsible For

All team members share the on-call rota, responding to platform incidents and driving them to resolution and follow-up.

Platform Reliability & Operations

• Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for the container platform, building error-budget policies that gate platform changes.
• Own the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) process for new platform capabilities and major changes.
• Design and track platform uptime metrics; improve observability across logs, metrics, and traces.
• Drive blameless postmortems, identify failure patterns, and implement systemic improvements.

Software Engineering

• Build and maintain platform automation, controllers, operators, and internal tooling in production code.
• Design and implement platform CI/CD and rollout primitives.
• Implement security automation, including intrusion detection, automated remediation, and patch management.
• Automate operational toil and contribute to platform testing suites and pipelines.

Tooling, Ecosystem & Architecture

• Act as an architectural and reliability expert in failure-mode analysis, dependency mapping, and resilience design.
• Evaluate and evolve the tooling ecosystem across orchestration, runtime, networking, isolation, and observability.
• Improve system architecture to reduce infrastructure costs while balancing security, reliability, and performance.
• Guide tenant teams in sustainable on-call and alerting practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in platform engineering, container/Kubernetes platform operations, SRE, or production infrastructure.
• Experience operating large-scale production systems and participating in an on-call rotation.
• Deep strength in at least one (ideally two) of: Tooling & ecosystem, Software engineering, or Operational/SRE practice.
• Experience writing production code (Go or a comparable systems language) and building controllers, operators, or platform APIs.
• Strong understanding of multi-tenancy and workload isolation primitives (RBAC, network policies, vCluster, VM-class runtimes, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with AWS (multi-account, IAM, VPC), Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK).
• Ability to script and automate operational tasks.
• Clear communication skills and comfort working in an asynchronous, globally distributed environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience building and operating internal multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms.
• Familiarity with policy engines (Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper) and cost-attribution tooling (OpenCost, Kubecost).
• Experience with PostgreSQL or managed database platforms.
• Familiarity with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or Grafana.