Pre-Sales Solutions Architect (SA) Leader

About the role

ABOUT SUPABASE Supabase is the Postgres development platform, built by developers for developers. We provide a complete backend solution including Database, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions, Realtime, and Vector Search. All services are deeply integrated and designed for growth. ABOUT THE ROLE The Pre-Sales Solutions Architect (SA) Leader owns the health, direction, and performance of the Solutions Architecture function. Where an individual SA is the technical owner within the sales cycle for their assigned opportunities, the SA Leader is accountable for technical win rate and deal velocity across the entire pre-sales motion — every channel the team supports, and the people who deliver against it. The SA Leader is a player-coach: they carry direct accountability for channel coverage, the most strategic or highest-stakes evaluations, and cross-functional GTM alignment, while spending the majority of their time developing individual SAs so the team's proactive, commercially-sharp approach scales without becoming order-taking. Compensation Note: SA Leader compensation is tied to team-wide ARR bookings — new logo, expansion, and multi-year commitments across every SA's pipeline, not just deals the Leader personally works. The Leader is expected to operate with the same commercial mindset as the team, at portfolio scale. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES PEOPLE LEADERSHIP & TEAM DEVELOPMENT The SA Leader hires, coaches, and grows the SA team so each member operates as a credible, commercially sharp technical partner in the sales cycle. This includes: - Hiring and onboarding new SAs, including calibrating them against the channel-specific technical evaluation prompts - Running regular 1:1s, reviewing deal strategy, PoC scoping, and objection handling, and giving direct feedback - Building and maintaining repeatable playbooks (discovery frameworks, PoC templates, objection/RFP responses, competitive positioning) so quality doesn't depend on tenure - Setting and holding the team to a consistent bar for technical depth, commercial instinct, and quota attainment CHANNEL & COVERAGE OWNERSHIP The SA Leader owns the coverage model for the entire function — deciding, tracking, and rebalancing which SAs support which channels, and closing gaps as pipeline shifts. This includes accountability across all five channels in the SA Channel Mapping https://app.notion.com/p/Solutions-Architect-SA-Overview-3835004b775f81789255e36a2fb4b799?pvs=21: - Direct Sales (AMER, EMEA, APJ) - Hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI) - Accelerators, Incubators, VCs (YCombinator, TechStars, 500 Startups) - SfP + OAuth Partners (Lovable, Bolt, Anthropic) - Solution Providers (Postgres.ai http://Postgres.ai, Stormatics) - Rebalancing SA assignment across channels as pipeline volume, deal complexity, or new partner motions shift - Resolving coverage gaps (a channel with no dedicated SA depth, or a region outgrowing its current allocation) and deciding when a hire, a cross-channel reassignment, or a controlled exception is the right fix - Approving which opportunities warrant Leader-level involvement directly, versus staying with the assigned SA TECHNICAL SALES OWNERSHIP (OVERSIGHT) The SA Leader ensures every significant opportunity has a clear, accountable technical owner across architecture fit, use cases, evaluation criteria, and competitive positioning — spot-checking deal documentation and risk tracking across the pipeline, and stepping in directly on the largest or most strategic evaluations. DISCOVERY AND TECHNICAL QUALIFICATION (OVERSIGHT) The SA Leader ensures the team consistently qualifies opportunities as technically winnable early, coaching SAs on discovery quality and holding the team accountable for surfacing deal-level risk to AEs and sales leadership before it costs a deal. PROOF OF CONCEPT AND EVALUATION SUPPORT (OVERSIGHT) The SA Leader ensures PoCs across the team are scoped to demonstrate differentiated value, not just technical box-checking — auditing success criteria, evaluation structure, and win-rate patterns across the whole book of active evaluations. TECHNICAL OBJECTION HANDLING (OVERSIGHT) The SA Leader is the escalation layer above the individual SA for the hardest architecture, security, or compliance objections — brought in on RFPs, security questionnaires, and competitive deals that could stall without senior technical input, without replacing the SA as the deal's primary technical contact. COMMERCIAL TECHNICAL ALIGNMENT (OVERSIGHT) The SA Leader ensures the team consistently connects technical requirements to commercial outcomes across the pipeline, and personally engages on pricing/packaging justification and expansion-signal strategy for the largest deals. INTERNAL COLLABORATION SALES (ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES) The SA Leader partners with Sales leadership to make sure SA/AE pairing is working at the portfolio level — owning the technical narrative in aggregate while sales leadership owns the commercial motion — and personally steps in when a specific SA/AE partnership needs adjudicating. PARTNERSHIPS The SA Leader works with Partner Leads across every channel (Hyperscalers, Accelerators, SfP+OAuth, Solution Providers) to make sure SA support scales with each channel's motion, while commercial terms and channel strategy stay owned by the Partner Lead. ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT The SA Leader represents the aggregated market signal — patterns across deals, not just one opportunity — to engineering and product, and prioritizes which recurring technical blockers or roadmap gaps are costing the team deals versus which are one-offs. TECHNICAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT (TAM) AND CUSTOMER ENGINEERING The SA Leader ensures handoff quality from pre-sale to post-sale is consistent across the team — auditing that architecture decisions, commitments, and open items are documented well enough that TAMs and CEs can drive early adoption without re-discovering the deal. SUCCESS METRICS SA Leader effectiveness is measured by commercial and technical outcomes across the whole team, not just their own deals: - Team ARR Bookings — new logo and expansion ARR across every SA's pipeline, relative to team quota - Deal Velocity — time from technical qualification to technical win, tracked across channels - PoC Win Rate — percentage of structured evaluations that convert to closed-won, team-wide - Pipeline Coverage — volume and quality of SA-engaged opportunities relative to quota, per channel - Handoff Quality — post-sale team satisfaction with documentation and deal context, across the team - Team health — ramp time to productivity for new SAs, retention of the SA team itself TOOLS USED BY THE SA TEAM This section documents the tools and systems used by the Solutions Architecture team. It is intended to be kept up to date as tooling evolves. - HubSpot - Hex - AdminConsole - Grafana SCOPE OF COVERAGE The SA Leader is accountable for technical pre-sales coverage across every channel the function supports, not a single book of deals: 1. Direct Sales (AMER, EMEA, APJ) 2. Hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI) 3. Accelerators, Incubators, VCs (YCombinator, TechStars, 500 Startups) 4. SfP + OAuth Partners (Lovable, Bolt, Anthropic) 5. Solution Providers (Postgres.ai http://Postgres.ai, Stormatics) Each channel requires a different selling motion and technical path to win; the SA Leader ensures the team's channel assignment and playbooks keep pace with where pipeline is actually moving. WHAT SA LEADERS DO NOT DO To keep the function focused and scaling, the SA Leader does not: - Own post-sale technical delivery or ongoing account management — that stays with TAM/CE - Perform implementation or professional services work outside of a formal PoC - Take over account health monitoring - Set or negotiate commercial terms independently of the AE or Partner Lead - Replace the individual SA as a deal's primary technical contact — the Leader escalates in, they don't take over IDEAL INDIVIDUAL A world-class SA Leader at Supabase has done the individual SA job well — deeply technical, commercially sharp, genuinely curious about how customers build — and now wants to multiply that across a team. - Technical depth — Can still design a production-grade architecture in a discovery call, debug a PoC, and earn credibility with a CTO on the spot - People leadership — Has hired, coached, and grown a technical sales team before; gives direct, specific feedback and knows how to develop an SA into a future lead - Channel-level judgment — Can look across all five channels and tell where coverage is thin, where a channel's motion is shifting, and where to reallocate SA attention - Commercial instinct at scale — Thinks in team-wide ARR bookings, not just their own quota; knows which deals warrant Leader-level involvement - Expansion mindset — Coaches SAs to proactively surface new teams, workloads, and use cases that grow account footprint, and does the same personally on the largest deals - Communication range — Equally credible whiteboarding with a senior engineer, coaching an SA through a hard escalation, and briefing sales leadership on pipeline health - Internal leverage — Turns competitive patterns, objection responses, and architecture templates from individual deals into playbooks that scale across the team - Quota attainment (team) — Track record of carrying and closing a pre-sales quota personally, plus experience being accountable for a team's aggregate number - Experience — Has built something in production, comes from an engineering, founding, or hands-on technical background, and has led a technical, customer-facing team SUMMARY The Pre-Sales Solutions Architect Leader exists to make sure every channel the SA function is accountable for — Direct Sales, Hyperscalers, Accelerators, SfP+OAuth Partners, and Solution Providers — has the right technical coverage to win deals, and that the team delivering against it keeps getting better. WHAT WE OFFER - Fully Remote We hire globally. We believe you can do your best work from anywhere. There are no Supabase offices, but we provide a WeWork membership or co-working allowance you can use anywhere in the world. - ESOP Every team member receives ESOP (equity ownership) in the company. We want everyone to share in the upside of what we’re building together. - Tech Allowance Use this budget to set up your ideal work environment—laptop, monitor, headphones, or whatever helps you do your best work. - Health Benefits Supabase covers 100% of health insurance for employees and 80% for dependents, wherever you are. Your wellbeing and your family’s health are important to us. - Annual Off-Sites Once a year, the entire company gathers in a new city for a week of connection, collaboration, and fun. It’s a highlight of our year. - Flexible Work We operate asynchronously and trust you to manage your own time. You know what needs to be done and when. - Professional Development Every team member receives an annual education allowance to spend on learning—courses, books, conferences, or anything that supports your growth. ABOUT THE TEAM Supabase was born-remote and open-source-first. We believe our globally distributed team is our secret weapon in building tools developers love. - ~400 team members - 60+ countries - 20+ languages spoken - Over $1B raised (including our $500M Series F) - 540,000+ community members We move fast, build in public, and use what we ship. If it’s in your project, we probably use it in ours too. We believe deeply in the open-source ecosystem and strive to support—not replace—existing tools and communities.