Supabase · ~400 employees
Supabase
Six niche technical hires in six weeks, all surfaced through open-source contribution patterns rather than sourcing through LinkedIn recruiter alone.
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Hires
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Intro to hire
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Open-source sourced
The situation
Supabase is an open-source backend platform built on Postgres, used by more than four million developers. At around 400 people, the company was hiring into the parts of its stack where the talent pool is smallest — SDK engineering, and the ETL and warehouse layer — ahead of a major funding round announced in June. Given the scale of the headcount addition and the volume of inbound created by Supabase's popularity once the roles went live, the internal team recognized that additional support on their most sourcing-heavy roles would be the fastest way to move the pipelines forward. Through a long-standing relationship with one of their internal recruiters, we were brought in to help. The ask was straightforward: bring us the best, as quickly as possible. Supabase is also known for its high technical bar, so the focus was always on quality, to avoid wasting hiring managers' time when they were already juggling competing mandates.
The search
Structured approach. We immersed ourselves in Supabase's culture, how they hire, and what "great" looks like for each team, understanding the specific dynamics of the roles we were filling. By the time we spoke to candidates, we could talk about Supabase as fluently as their own internal team, which made it easy to spot the right fit and build genuine excitement in the conversation. Sourced from code rather than CVs. To find these candidates, we deployed our Open Source Contribution Engine, which reads and ranks open-source contribution history instead of self-reported profiles. It identifies engineers by what they've shipped — which repositories they commit to, how frequently, which ecosystems they work in, how deep their technical fingerprint goes, and where they hold real expertise rather than surface exposure. We found where these engineers actually live online and met them there, with outreach built around their work rather than LinkedIn InMail. The practical effect is a different candidate pool, not a faster route to the same one. These are passive engineers who don't appear in a standard search because keywords alone do not uncover their contributions. Outreach based on what they had built. Given how scarce these candidates were, every message needed to be sharp and relevant, both to earn a response and to represent Supabase well. Our understanding of their work, combined with a clear sense of why the role would matter to them, drove one of our highest response rates to date, helped further by Supabase's own reputation among developers.
The outcome
We deliberately kept submissions to only the strongest candidates, and the conversion rate showed it: every engineer we submitted made it to later stages. In a couple of cases, candidates who lost out on their original role were strong enough to be introduced to a different team instead. Hiring managers saved time, and every submission counted.
Hires made
- 4x SDK Engineer (C#, Go, Flutter, Kotlin)
- 2x ETL and Warehouse Engineer (Rust)
