VP of Product, Cockroach Labs
$302-399.6k
+ Stock Options
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
Job no longer available
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$302-399.6k
+ Stock Options
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To simplify how businesses build and operate world-changing applications.
Role
Who you are
- This leader will bring deep systems thinking, emphasizing the importance of the processes and practices that generate exceptional products, not merely the products themselves
- Critical to this role is agility—navigating uncertainty, challenging assumptions, and continuously evolving our approach
- We seek someone humble enough to deeply understand and build upon what has driven our success to date while confidently applying their experience and insights
- 15+ years of experience in Product Management, Product Design, and Product Marketing with 10+ years in leadership roles
- Proven experience leading product teams in database companies, preferably distributed SQL or distributed systems
- Experience scaling and retaining high-performing, global teams, including managing managers in complex orgs
- Demonstrated success in building and scaling developer platforms or cloud infrastructure products
- Deep experience collaborating cross-functionally with Engineering, GTM, Finance, and Legal
- Strong communication, public speaking, and leadership skills, with experience influencing at the executive level
- A track record of delivering high-impact, cross-functional projects that drive company-wide initiatives
- Excellent writing skills – our strategic product meetings rely on written docs, not slides
What the job involves
- The VP, Product will play a pivotal role in shaping and scaling our global Product organization, overseeing Product Management, Product Design, and Product Marketing
- Implement and continuously refine the processes and frameworks that result in clear, impactful product strategies and roadmaps
- Foster a culture deeply rooted in customer-centricity, leveraging customer insights to inform strategic decisions
- Collaborate closely with executive leadership, ensuring product initiatives align dynamically with evolving business priorities and market conditions
- Cultivate and maintain strong partnerships with key customers and stakeholders to guide future product direction
- Work collaboratively and fluidly with Engineering, GTM, and other cross-functional teams, driving integrated and efficient product execution
- Continuously improve operational excellence through agile processes, rapid experimentation, and iterative learning
- Grow and nurture high-performing Product Management, Product Design, and Product Marketing teams, fostering a culture that values curiosity, continuous learning, and adaptability
- Establish clear, meaningful success metrics for product initiatives, driving accountability through regular measurement, analysis, and adaptation
- Attract, mentor, and retain exceptional talent by prioritizing career development, fostering engagement, and celebrating collaborative achievement
- Refine and run the “operating system” for the product management team
- Evaluate and optimize the Product Management, Product Design, and Product Marketing team’s impact on company goals, addressing any gaps proactively
- Drive product strategy for CockroachDB and Cloud, ensuring a highly available, scalable, and high-performance architecture
- Lead the global, high-performing product organization, including managing and mentoring Director-level product leaders
- Balance platform investments to support the needs of large self-hosted customers while enabling SaaS customers
- Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, GTM, Finance, and Legal to ensure seamless product execution and business alignment
- Develop and execute the technical partnership strategy in collaboration with our channels team
- Influence at the executive level, effectively communicating product progress, market fit, and financial impact
- Stay informed on industry trends, competitive dynamics, and emerging technologies in cloud infrastructure, databases, and developer platforms
- First 30 Days:
- Gain a deep understanding of our market, strategic priorities, and active initiatives
- Learn how we build products for self-hosted and SaaS users, and the tradeoffs involved
- Meet your direct reports, their teams, and key stakeholders across Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing
- Take over product leadership responsibilities, including leading PM rituals and MBO goal setting
- First 3 Months:
- Be fully integrated into the team and develop a hypothesis on key product investments
- Identify what capabilities we need to build in order to help developers build world-changing apps
- Socialize your vision with the EVP of R&D and executive team to align on next steps
- Reporting to Isaac Wong - Executive Vice President, R&D
Our take
Cockroach Labs was founded by a team of ex-Google employees who wanted to build a database management system similar to Google’s Spanner. The result is CockroachDB, an open-source, distributed SQL database that delivers familiar SQL, strong consistency, and near-indestructible fault tolerance. Designed to scale locally or globally and deployed on any cloud or on-prem setup, it keeps mission-critical applications running even through hardware failures or full data-center outages.
A major milestone in the company's growth is its partnership with IBM, which integrates CockroachBD into IBM's hybrid infrastructure. This makes it far easier for long-standing mainframe users to modernize without rewriting massive amounts of code. Running CockroachDB on systems like LinuxONE, Linux on Z, Power Systems, and Red Hat OpenShift helps organizations adopt cloud-native architectures while staying in environments they trust. At the same time, enterprise demand is surging, and the company is boasting significant year-on-year growth in new customers, ARR, and cloud adoption.
As applications become more global, always-on, and increasingly AI-driven, businesses need databases built for scale, resilience, and zero downtime. And CockroachDB was engineered for exactly that. With a decade of innovation, expanding enterprise traction, and a leadership team experienced in scaling high-growth tech companies, Cockroach Labs is set to power the next generation of mission-critical applications.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Dec 2021
$278m
SERIES F
Jan 2021
$160m
SERIES E
Total funding: $633.2m
Company benefits
- Competitive Health Insurance Coverage
- Paid Parental Leave
- Flexible PTO
- Learning & Development
- Relocation Support
- Employee Referral Bonus
Company HQ
Chelsea, New York, NY
Leadership
Spencer Kimball
(Co-Founder & CEO)Worked at WeGo Systems as CTO for 3 years before joining Google as a Software Engineer for almost 10 years. Also, previous CTO of Viewfinder and Engineer at Square.
Peter Matiss
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously a Software Engineer at Square, Co-Founder at Viewfinder and a Software Engineer at Google.
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