Alignment Before Acceleration: Building an Intentional Hiring Process in an Async World

High growth and high alignment aren’t always mutually exclusive, but the result of when they are is overwhelmingly positive.

Still early in her role at Supabase, Michaela Burpoe is already proving this. While it’s not always easy, you can scale rapidly while staying thoughtful, even in an async environment where clarity is currency.

Here are some of the core takeaways from my recent conversation with Michaela, where she broke down what intentional hiring really looks like.

Hint: It’s not just filling roles fast, but laying the groundwork to make every hire count.

🧱 Start With Structure, Not Speed

When your team is async and global, you're not only optimizing for velocity, but also for clarity. 

Michaela’s first step at Supabase? Rebuilding the recruiting foundation: interviewing scorecards, kickoff calls, alignment check-ins, and interviewer calibration.

The highlight here? Even hiring goals from 90 days ago may no longer be valid.

That means rethinking roles, checking for drift, and ensuring everyone understands what “good” actually looks like on an ongoing basis is critical.

🧪 Define What "Good" Means, Together

Hiring is a team sport, from beginning to end.

For example, scorecards are only useful if the team has a shared understanding of the behaviors and signals behind them.

At Supabase, they go beyond rating systems. Michaela facilitates role-plays, defines red/yellow/green flags for values like "ego-lessness," and uses real examples to train interviewers.

This process creates a scalable, decentralized system where each interviewer is empowered to assess candidates accurately and fairly, even asynchronously.

🤝 Make Hiring a Team Sport

It’s such an important topic that I listed it twice!

With a lean people team, Michaela is building hiring into Supabase’s DNA. 

While new interviewers are often identified during performance reviews and invited into the process, it’s never without support from things like training and clear, upfront expectations.

When interviewing is treated as professional development, not just a task, employees lean in. They even ask for feedback on their feedback, which is a clear sign of a hiring culture that values continuous improvement.

📖 Context Over Credentials

Supabase doesn't default to linear career paths. 

Michaela looks for self-driven stories: engineers turned SDRs, side projects, gaps with purpose. Every candidate is encouraged to explain their journey, and resume "red flags" become opportunities for signal-spotting.

This kind of evaluation is only possible with process maturity and a genuine belief in candidate potential, rather than simply rejecting someone who might have a unique professional path.

🤖 AI isn’t the Problem; Inauthenticity is.

Michaela estimates around 60% of candidates are submitting AI-generated responses to application questions. Many are straight up copy/paste.

But the ones who use AI as a partner, not as a crutch, stand out.

During our conversation, Michaela shared a great example of a candidate who used an AI job-matching tool to surface the Supabase role. That's the type of resourcefulness that Supabase wants to embrace.

Michaela’s advice: “It’s OK to use AI, just don’t lose your voice in the process.”

🏁 Final Thoughts

As Michaela puts it, “Great companies aren’t just built on great ideas. They’re built by great people.” 

In most work environments, but especially in async, remote environments, you can’t rely on osmosis. Every step of the hiring process must be intentional and collaborative. 

When you take the time to align before you accelerate, you do more than build scalability.

You build momentum.

Supabase’s approach is proof that with the right foundation, you can grow fast and grow well.

🎧 Catch the full episode with Michaela Burpoe from Supabase to hear how her team is scaling fast and right.

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