CLI Engineer
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
We are looking for a CLI Engineer to join our CLI Team and help build a world-class local development experience.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role focused on the supabase CLI, local development tooling, and the developer experience that makes Supabase feel like a first-class part of any dev environment. At this level, you'll also be a technical anchor for the team — setting the bar on architecture, owning the hardest problems, and raising the quality of the engineers around you.
You will work closely with customers, product teams, and the open source community to deliver tooling that is consistent, secure, and performant across Windows, Linux, and macOS.
This role is ideal for someone who thrives in async, fast-paced environments and is energized by building developer tools that scale to millions.
What You'll Be Responsible For
Designing and developing CLI tooling that is consistent, secure, and performant across Windows, Linux, and macOS
Driving architecture decisions for the CLI and local development stack — writing RFCs, building consensus, and move proposals to outcomes
Owning the hardest cross-platform problems: edge cases, release engineering, backwards compatibility, performance at scale
Defining and maintaining CLI design standards — command structure, output formatting, error messaging, agentic usability — that the team builds against
Designing and evaluating CLI behavior for agentic workflows, ensuring the CLI is as usable for AI agents as it is for developers, and building the evals that measure that
Collaborating with product and platform teams to define end-to-end behavior: from API design through to how the CLI and local development stack surface those capabilities
Implementing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests so reliability and maintainability stay high as the surface area grows
Raising the technical quality of the team through structured code review, design feedback, and pairing — you take satisfaction in making the engineers around you better, not just shipping your own work
Creating documentation and help content for CLI users and contributing developers
Participating in releases, versioning, and backwards compatibility for the components you own
Monitoring usage and feedback; working with customers and the open source community to improve CLI experiences
Engaging with the open-source community — contributors, issues, feedback
You Might Be A Good Fit If You
Have 5-8 years building developer-facing tooling, most of it on a CLI
Have strong TypeScript experience — this is a TypeScript codebase and you should be genuinely comfortable at depth
Have hands-on experience building, maintaining, or owning CLIs — including cross-platform concerns: filesystem access, subprocess management, terminal UX, and platform-specific behavior
Have a track record making and defending architectural decisions in a collaborative, async environment — RFCs, design docs, building consensus
Have experience building CLIs with great developer UX: intuitive command structure, clear output, actionable error messaging
Are familiar with agentic workflows and designing for agent use cases
Are familiar with package distribution and installation (npm, Homebrew, APT, Snap, Scoop, Chocolatey)
Have solid Git workflow and CI/CD experience for automated testing and deployment
Are highly auto