Engineering Manager, Cockroach Labs
Migrations
+ Stock Options
More information about location
3 days a week in office
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
Be an early applicant
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
+ 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
- 2+ years of experience managing software engineering teams, with a track record of building high-performing, collaborative teams
- A strong technical background with hands-on experience in areas such as distributed systems, data replication, databases, or infrastructure tooling
- Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML applications, including working with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows
- Experience owning and operating release pipelines and production systems
- Familiarity with programming languages like Go, Python, C/C++, or Java
- Experience using or building with one or more database technologies (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2, CockroachDB)
- A demonstrated ability to partner with product management and cross-functional stakeholders to define and execute on a technical roadmap
- Strong communication skills and a passion for mentoring and developing engineers at various career stages
- 10+ years of overall software engineering experience (preferred)
- A BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience
What the job involves
- At Cockroach Labs, we strive to deliver a delightful experience to our customers starting from their first interaction with our database
- The Migrations team owns the full suite of MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) tooling that enables customers to seamlessly move their workloads from external databases to CockroachDB and our cloud offerings
- This team also owns the release pipelines for that tooling, operating with significant autonomy
- We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow this team during a pivotal moment: the team's charter is expanding to leverage AI to radically simplify the migrations journey and to unify all of the MOLT tooling into a single, cohesive experience
- You will be responsible for the people, execution, and technical direction of the team, balancing near-term delivery of migration tooling with longer-term investment in AI-driven capabilities
- In this role, you will shape one of the first touchpoints new customers have with CockroachDB, giving you a front-row seat to our rapid growth
- You will partner closely with product, design, field engineering, and leadership to define and execute a roadmap that makes CockroachDB the easiest database migration target in the industry
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers building database migration tooling and AI-powered migration capabilities
- Own the end-to-end delivery of the MOLT tooling suite, including its release pipelines, ensuring high quality and reliability
- Drive the team's expanded charter to apply AI/ML to the migrations journey — from experimentation and prototyping through to production-grade systems
- Champion the vision of unifying all MOLT tooling into a single, cohesive migration experience for customers
- Partner with product management, design, field engineering, and customers to deeply understand migration pain points and translate them into a clear engineering roadmap
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, experimentation, and continuous improvement within the team
- Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering teams across the cloud and database organizations
- Recruit, hire, and onboard top engineering talent as the team grows
- Establish and track clear success metrics for both migration tooling and AI-driven initiatives (e.g., migration success rates, LLM accuracy, customer adoption)
- In the first month you will join the engineering team and start to learn about our production systems, the MOLT tooling suite, the architecture of CockroachDB, and how our users interact with our migration offerings. You will build relationships with your direct reports, understand current team dynamics, and begin to familiarize yourself with ongoing projects and priorities. We believe it's essential for you to take this first month to become deeply familiar with our technology, team, and culture
- After 3 months you'll have a thorough understanding of the team's technical landscape, have established strong working relationships across engineering, product, and field teams, and be actively driving execution on the team's roadmap. You will have assessed the team's strengths and growth areas and begun shaping the team's approach to integrating AI into the migration tooling. You will also have a clear view of hiring needs and be actively recruiting
- As the team grows, you will have the opportunity to shape the strategic direction of migrations at Cockroach Labs — defining how AI transforms the migration experience, unifying the MOLT tooling into a seamless product, and building a high-performing team that delivers outsized impact. We want to eliminate the headaches of database migrations for our users, and you will play a crucial leadership role in making that happen
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 engienered for exaclt ythat. 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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