CLI Engineer

Job description

About this role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Qualifications and requirements

• 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 autonomous — you don't need a lot of direction to go deep and ship