Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world.

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB. Our mission is to be the trusted global database to run mission-critical applications for the world's most important businesses. We created CockroachDB to unshackle teams from the constraints of their database. 

About the Role

Are you ready to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of database technology? We are seeking a curious, driven & experienced Product Manager to take ownership of the foundational aspects of CockroachDB, the database trusted by the most demanding & advanced customers globally for its resilience, scalability, & performance. 

Just like CockroachDB is not your typical database, this is not your typical Product Management role. In addition to functional requirements, youll be defining success by behavioral requirements less As a user I can see my account balance, more When a cluster encounters a partial asymmetric partition between two nodes, queries initiated from any gateway node will succeed with no more than 200% increase in latency. You will own, define & implement a strategy for improving the foundational characteristics of a mission-critical database Resilience, Stability, Predictable Performance. By doing so, youll continue to deepen the core value proposition that draws customers to CockroachDB & accelerate the foothold of CockroachDB in the $100B+ database market.

You Will

• Collaborate with Customers: Work with customers to understand & address pain points collecting requirements, documenting needs & collaborating with account teams & professional services to provide technical guidance.
• Roll up your sleeves: Set up reproduction environments to experience customer behaviors to empathize with & understand their situation.
• Develop & implement strategies: Cockroach Labs expects all Product Managers to drive their areas strategy. Youll play a large role in creating & adopting a strategy around improving Resilience, Stability & Performance, as well as around how to balance across those investments & short-term customer needs.
• Make hard decisions: Manage a roadmap by translating that strategy & customer feedback into targeted outcomes, collaborating with Engineering, Revenue & others to make hard prioritization (and deprioritization) decisions.
• Drive value, not features: Before development starts, youll define success criteria & document customer end-to-end expectations. Throughout & after development, youll ensure the proper testing is completed many times by you to ensure were providing the value that customers need to be successful.
• Bring that value to market: As the expert in the databases core behaviors & best practices, youll partner with Engineering, Documentation, Marketing & Technical Field teams to map database characteristics to optimal database configurations that help customers achieve success..

The Expectations

In the first 30-60 days, you will go through PM onboarding with your onboarding mentor (Roachmate). You will familiarize yourself with the current state of our Resilience, Stability & Performance capabilities & characteristics. You will spin up ad hoc CockroachDB clusters, & test those capabilities & characteristics tearing down networks to observe partitions, injecting pauses to simulate disk stalls, running adversarial workloads to understand the behaviors to get a sense of the end-to-end experience for yourself. Youll read technical RFCs, Design Docs, & Technical Notes to deeply understand the mechanisms & use them to  explain the behaviors you experienced. Youll review our current backlog & technical requests, get up to speed on in-flight features, & understand today's most pressing customer problems. 

After 90 days, you will be fully integrated into the team. You will begin to develop a database Resilience strategy & go-to-market approach, including tutorials & best practices. You will author Product Briefs, defining success requirements for database behavior during CPU saturation & collaborating with Engineers on testing setups to validate success. Youll design the UX of new features, outlining the setup, maintenance & support user journeys & the required behaviors that will bring user delight (or as much as you can during a prod incident). You will partner with our Sales team & our most important customers operating teams to deeply understand their problems & explain to them the technological reasons theyre experiencing a particular database behavior. This expertise becomes integral as you become a key advisor to senior leaders in determining how investments in Resilience, Stability & Performance can support & accelerate our growth.

You Have

• Recent working experience as a backend Software Developer or Field Engineer and/or a Computer Science degree
• Strong technical background, with the ability to understand & communicate complex technical concepts to both technical & non-technical stakeholders
• Minimum 8 years of total work experience with enterprise or SaaS products 
• Delivered successful customer-facing products or features by partnering with senior Engineering teams 
• Background working directly with medium-sized to large enterprises to understand & address problems, set proper timelines & expectations around feature delivery to internal stakeholders & external teams
• Experience driving business results through influential communication & cross-functional stakeholder management
• A collaborative approach & an eagerness to partner with other product teams & all other functions in the company, such as Legal, Finance, Marketing, & Sales 

The Team

Reporting to Michael Wang - Director of Product Management

Our Benefits

• Competitive Health Insurance Coverage (for you & your dependents!)
• Paid Parental Leave (with baby bucks)
• Flexible PTO
• Learning & Development Budget
• Relocation Support (as applicable)

Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse & inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at accessibility@cockroachlabs.com.

The annual anticipated base salary range for U.S. candidates for this role is USD $165,000 to $225,000, plus commission if a sales role. We set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, & geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location.  Actual salaries may vary & fall outside of this range depending on factors such as a candidates qualifications, geographic location, skills, experience, & competencies. In addition, we are often open to a wide variety of profiles, & recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. Salary is one component of the Cockroach Labs total rewards package, which includes stock options, health insurance, life & disability insurance, funds towards professional development resources, flexible PTO, paid holidays, & parental leave, to name a few! Salaries for candidates outside the U.S. will vary based on local compensation structures.