Member of Technical Staff, Cockroach Labs
AI Migrations
+ Stock Options
Cloud-native, distributed SQL database
Be an early applicant
Cloud-native, distributed SQL database
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
+ Stock Options
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Cockroach Labs' mission is to make data easy by providing an industry-leading model for resilience, horizontal scalability to accommodate fast-growing businesses, and the ability to move data close to business' customers, wherever they reside across the globe.
Role
Who you are
- Experimental mindset: You're energized by ambiguous problems, rapid prototyping, and discovering solutions through data-driven experimentation
- AI/ML technical foundation: Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and model evaluation through professional work, significant side projects, or deep technical exploration
- Strong programming skills: Proficiency in Go, Python or similar languages, with the ability to quickly learn new technologies and APIs
- Greenfield experience: Background building new products, prototypes, or research projects where the solution path wasn't predefined
- Collaborative problem-solving: Experience working directly with internal stakeholders, gathering requirements, and iterating based on user feedback
- Technical communication: Ability to explain complex experimental results and technical concepts to diverse audiences
- Experience level: Ideally 7+ years of software engineering experience, with hands-on work in AI/ML
What the job involves
- We’re launching a fast-moving engineering team focused on applying AI to one of the most complex and underserved challenges in infrastructure: database migrations
- Migrations today are slow, manual, and risky—especially when they involve legacy stored procedures and deeply embedded business logic
- Our goal is to radically simplify this journey by building intelligent tools that can translate, evaluate, and automate the hardest parts of moving data across systems
- As a founding member, you’ll help prototype and launch cutting-edge systems such as:
- Build intelligent AI agents to modernize legacy SQL: Develop agents powered by LLMs that can analyze and convert complex legacy SQL schemas and procedural logic into scalable, CockroachDB-native equivalents—unlocking modernization at scale for enterprises with deeply entrenched database systems
- Design an AI-powered migration strategist: Architect an LLM-driven engine that intelligently scans source schemas and real-world workload patterns to produce actionable, tailored migration plans
- This system will go beyond static analysis, offering smart, dynamic guidance for what to migrate, how to do it, and what to watch out for—bringing clarity and confidence to a traditionally risky process
- This is a unique opportunity to apply AI/ML to deep, real-world problems and to operate like a startup within a product-driven company
- If you’re passionate about building intelligent systems that solve meaningful problems—and want to move fast, own your work, and help define a new frontier—we’d love to hear from you
- Validate ideas through experimentation: Design and run focused experiments to explore how today’s AI tools can help us deliver real, incremental value in the migrations space
- Test and iterate with AI approaches: Explore APIs like OpenAI and Anthropic, refine prompts, and tune context windows to optimize how LLMs perform on procedural translation and analysis tasks
- Partner with domain experts: Collaborate closely with our migrations technical field community to deeply understand the pain points users face throughout the migration journey
- Prototype fast, learn faster: Build proof-of-concept tools and agents from your findings, then use data and feedback to shape what comes next
- Track progress and define success: Establish and monitor clear evaluation criteria (like LLM accuracy or usability metrics) to guide the validation process
- Build for scale: When experiments show promise, turn them into scalable systems using Go, Python, and modern cloud infrastructure
- Explore advanced patterns: When the time is right, dive into more sophisticated approaches like multi-step reasoning, agentic workflows, or integrating with our internal control planes (e.g., MCP)
- As an early team member, you’ll be hands-on shaping how we apply AI to one of the most challenging areas in data infrastructure: database migrations. You'll move quickly from experimentation to implementation, working closely with users and engineers to build real, usable tools that make a difference
- In the first month, you’ll be up to speed on the complexity of real-world database migrations, the current AI-native development approaches we use, and the suite of tools already in place. You'll begin running your first experiments, identifying early signals for what might work
- After 3 months, you'll have validated key assumptions around how AI can reduce migration friction and complexity. You'll be actively prototyping new tools and workflows, working closely with internal stakeholders, and helping define the roadmap based on real results
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. It offers local or global scaling with familiar SQL, failproof fault tolerance, and guaranteed transaction consistency, and can be deployed across any cloud.
Maintaining full SQL compliance with global cloud capabilities will help Cockroach Labs take advantage of the wave of companies needing to scale their existing SQL databases onto the cloud. Cockroach Labs grew from a $2 billion valuation to $5 billion in under a year, proving itself as an enticing and approachable prospect in this developing sector.
It already commands a high-end raft of clients including Comcast, Bose, and Baidu - but competition is stiff, particularly with industry giants like Oracle and AWS. Its hope is that CockroachDB’s high failure tolerance and geo-distribution will provide attractively swift functionality whilst allowing customers to remain within their legal jurisdictions - and will prove pivotal in 5G use cases. Its success to date, targeted updates to ease network migrations, and its recent expansion into EMEA markets, suggest it has a strong shot.
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
- Employee referral bonus + donation match
- Connect and Contribute days
- Flexible Working
- Spring Health and an Employee Assistance Program to provide free counseling and support mental health
- $2500 annually to support learning and development through workshops, conferences, and networking events
- We dedicate company time to bond over everything from trivia and karaoke to paint-alongs and fitness classes
- Flexible Time Off
- 100% health insurance coverage & One Medical membership
- Gym discounts & free Citibike membership
- FSA
- 401(k)
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave & $500 in baby bucks
- Relocation Support
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
(CTO)Previously Software Engineer at Square, Co-Founder at Viewfinder and Software Engineer at Google.
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