Senior backend engineer — Supabase & relational data

About the role

We're building a persistent intelligence layer for every county, city, township, and school district in America — starting with all 87 Minnesota counties. Each public-facing page is powered by a growing knowledge base that learns from community interactions, AI conversations, and structured civic data.

You'll own the data foundation: designing and scaling the Supabase schema that connects people, places, pages, and geometry into a coherent, queryable graph. This is foundational, high-impact work at the intersection of relational databases, AI memory systems, and public data infrastructure.

What you'll own

• Design and maintain the core schema across all schemas and tables: people, places, pages, and geometry — with clean relationship modeling and referential integrity throughout
• Build and optimize Supabase tables, views, RLS policies, and Edge Functions that scale to millions of rows across thousands of civic entity pages
• Architect the knowledge extraction pipeline — processing AI conversation outputs into structured entities, facts, and confidence-weighted knowledge items stored per page
• Implement PostGIS geometry support for county boundaries, city limits, parcels, and geographic search queries across Minnesota and beyond
• Define and enforce data type standards, naming conventions, and indexing strategies across all tables
• Write and maintain internal technical documentation — schema diagrams, data dictionaries, migration runbooks, and onboarding guides for new engineers
• Collaborate with the AI and frontend teams to design optimized query patterns for real-time, context-aware responses
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks at scale — query plans, index tuning, partitioning strategies, and connection pooling via pgBouncer

What we're looking for

• 5\+ years of backend engineering with deep PostgreSQL expertise — not just ORM usage, but schema design, query optimization, and understanding the engine
• Hands-on Supabase experience: auth, RLS, storage, Edge Functions, real-time subscriptions, and the Supabase dashboard at a production level
• Strong grasp of relational data modeling — normalization, denormalization tradeoffs, junction tables, polymorphic relationships, and `jsonb` usage patterns
• Experience with geospatial data using PostGIS — geometry types, spatial indexes, and GIS query patterns are a strong plus
• Comfort working in AI-adjacent infrastructure — background job queues, extraction pipelines, vector embeddings, or LLM output storage
• A strong documentation habit — you write schemas and decisions down as a matter of course, not as an afterthought
• Experience designing for scale: multi-tenant architectures, row-level isolation, read replicas, and data growth modeling

Nice to have

• Experience with civic, government, or public-sector data — property records, GIS layers, election data, census data
• Familiarity with OpenAI Responses API or similar structured AI output pipelines
• Prior work on knowledge graph or entity resolution systems
• Contributions to open source database tooling or schema migration libraries

Why this role

You'll be the first person to fully own this data layer — which means real architectural influence and the chance to build something that will serve millions of civic interactions. The schema you design will underpin AI-assisted pages for every public entity in Minnesota and, eventually, nationwide.

We move fast, document as we go, and believe that clean data architecture is a form of public service.

Pay: $32,000\.00 - $91,844\.39 per year

Work Location: Remote