What Supabase does

Remote Work Europe sees the daily pattern of European remote job postings through our Connected job board – the trends this piece describes show up there too.

Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative – a Postgres-backed backend-as-a-service for developers. Authentication, database, real-time subscriptions, storage, edge functions, vector embeddings: the whole backend you’d otherwise build by hand for a typical web or mobile app, ready to use. The core is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence; they make money from managed hosting and enterprise features.

Founded in 2020 by Paul Copplestone and Ant Wilson, Supabase started as a project to build a more open alternative to Firebase, and built on Postgres rather than reinventing the database – which earned it a loyal following among engineers who value SQL and open standards. Since then it has scaled dramatically. In June 2026 the company raised a US$500 million Series F at a reported US$10.5 billion valuation, taking total funding past US$1 billion, and has positioned itself firmly around AI-era and “agentic” infrastructure as demand from AI-assisted development surged. This is no longer a scrappy weekend project – it’s one of the most heavily funded companies in developer tools.

Remote culture: what it’s actually like

Supabase describes itself as “born-remote”. There are no offices, the team works asynchronously across a huge spread of timezones, and written communication is the default rather than the exception. Their own careers page cites a team of several hundred people across 60+ countries, with co-founders based in Singapore and the UK – so this is a genuinely global company, not a US business with remote staff attached.

Annual in-person off-sites in rotating locations provide the face-to-face connection that a fully distributed team needs, and the whole operation runs on tools like Notion, Slack, and Discord.

The honest assessment: the remote model is real and well proven, but the context around it has changed fast. A company that raises this much money at this pace raises the bar and the intensity with it. The calm, indie-open-source texture of the early years is giving way to the pressures of hypergrowth and a high-stakes AI narrative to live up to. The hiring bar is famously high, and Supabase is engineering-heavy, so non-engineering roles are comparatively scarce. If you want a well-defined, low-ambiguity role, a fast-scaling company mid-pivot toward AI infrastructure is not the calmest place to land. If you want to work in the open on widely used tooling and can handle pace and change, the appeal is obvious.

Hiring in Europe: the details

Countries: Supabase hires globally with no fixed location requirement for most roles – employees and contractors sit in 60+ countries, including many across Europe. This is one of the most geographically distributed teams in developer tools.

Employment model: A mix of direct employment and contractor arrangements depending on where you live, common for a company hiring across this many jurisdictions. Confirm the specifics for your country during the process.

Timezone expectations: Async-first, so rigid hours are rare, though some roles note a preference for overlap with a specific team. With colleagues in nearly every timezone, written communication and good documentation are genuinely load-bearing.

Salary approach: Competitive for the market. Supabase does not publish standardised public salary bands, so treat compensation as a direct conversation during hiring.

Language requirements: English is the working language.

Who they’re looking for

Supabase is engineering-heavy and hires primarily across:

  • Software engineering (TypeScript, Go, Rust, Postgres internals)
  • Developer relations and developer advocacy
  • Product engineering
  • Design
  • Marketing (technical depth required)
  • Support engineering

The culture is shaped by being a dev-tool company that lives or dies on developer trust. They favour people who can earn that trust: engineers who ship maintainable code, designers who understand developer workflows, marketers who can write technical posts engineers actually want to read. Generic “I love startups” energy doesn’t land; specific, technically grounded interest in their stack does.

What current and former employees say

The praise centres on the open-source work, the calibre of the team, and the freedom of a genuinely remote, async company where you can do your best work from anywhere. Working on tooling used by a very large developer community is a real draw for engineers.

The cons are the ones you’d expect from a company scaling this fast. The pace is high, the hiring bar is demanding, and the enormous funding and AI positioning bring pressure and expectation that the earlier, calmer phase didn’t carry. Engineering-heavy hiring means limited room for non-technical people. And rapid growth inevitably changes a company’s texture – the intimate early-stage feel is harder to preserve at this size and valuation. Go in knowing you’re joining a hypergrowth business, not a small steady one.

How to apply

Specific tips: Build something with Supabase before you apply – the free tier is generous, and shipping a real project (a side project, a portfolio piece, even an internal tool) puts you well ahead of applicants who’ve only read the docs. Their main GitHub repo is active and the community is welcoming, so a meaningful pull request or a well-written issue gets you on the team’s radar before any formal application. And because everything they ship is open, your public work – code, technical writing, contributions – speaks louder here than a polished CV.

See our full guide to Remote-First Companies That Actually Hire in Europe.