Staff Field Engineer, Cockroach Labs
$140-175k
+ Stock Options + Commission
More information about location
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
Open for applications
Distributed SQL for always-on customer experiences
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$140-175k
+ Stock Options + Commission
More information about location
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To simplify how businesses build and operate world-changing applications.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, ideally with distributed systems or complex infrastructure projects
- Exposure to customer-facing or field engineering roles, providing technical guidance and support to clients
- Proficiency in at least one programming language; Go is preferred, but not required
- Strong understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, version control (Git), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)
- Experience working with at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues in production environments
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, capable of tailoring information to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Comfortable partnering with cross-functional teams—such as Solutions Engineers and Enterprise Architects—to gather requirements and drive customer success
- Willingness to adapt to changing priorities and customer needs in a fast-paced, innovative environment
What the job involves
- As a Field Software Engineer at Cockroach Labs, you’ll play a dual role: a hands-on software engineer contributing to CockroachDB’s ongoing development, and a trusted technical advisor helping customers realize its full potential
- You’ll design and build new features, integrations, and tools that address real-world needs—ranging from performance optimizations to orchestration enhancements—while also providing expertise to troubleshoot and resolve the most challenging database issues
- By working directly with customers in the field and collaborating closely with our Product and Engineering teams, you’ll ensure CockroachDB remains a best-in-class, distributed SQL database that solves complex data problems at global scale
- Design, implement, and maintain new features, integrations, and tooling to enhance CockroachDB, drawing on customer feedback and real-world use cases
- Develop and refine tools, scripts, and automation frameworks that streamline CockroachDB deployments, configurations, and scaling across on-prem, cloud, or hybrid environments—working closely with DevOps teams to integrate solutions into existing pipelines
- Investigate and resolve complex issues related to distributed systems, database performance, networking, and application integrations, ensuring production-grade reliability
- Gather and synthesize customer insights, working closely with Solutions Engineers and Enterprise Architects to provide actionable feedback to R&D, helping shape product enhancements and guide strategic roadmap decisions
- Act as a technical advisor for customers—leading architectural design sessions and providing best practices—while forging strong, long-term partnerships
- Create and maintain clear, actionable documentation for deployments, runbooks, and troubleshooting processes, and share insights with both internal teams and external users
- Within the first month, you'll make initial code contributions and set up your development environment
- By 60 days, you'll be actively engaging in more complex engineering tasks, collaborating with customer-facing teams, and starting to support customer projects
- At the 90-day mark, you'll be expected to lead small-scale projects independently, provide peer guidance, and deepen your expertise in performance optimization
- Beyond the first 90 days, you’ll consistently contribute impactful code, act as a technical advisor to customers, and influence product direction by sharing insights from the field with the R&D team
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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