Pre-Sales Solutions Architect (SA) Leader

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
:
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
, 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 (Hyperscaler