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 and experienced Product Manager to take ownership of the foundational aspects of CockroachDB, the database trusted by the most demanding and advanced customers globally for its resilience, scalability, and performance. 

Just like CockroachDB is not your typical database, this is not your typical Product Management role. In addition to functional requirements, you’ll 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 and implement a strategy for improving the foundational characteristics of a mission-critical database – Resilience, Stability, Predictable Performance. By doing so, you’ll continue to deepen the core value proposition that draws customers to CockroachDB and accelerate the foothold of CockroachDB in the $100B+ database market.

You Will

  • Collaborate with Customers: Work with customers to understand and address pain points – collecting requirements, documenting needs and collaborating with account teams and professional services to provide technical guidance.
  • Roll up your sleeves: Set up reproduction environments to experience customer behaviors to empathize with and understand their situation.
  • Develop and implement strategies: Cockroach Labs expects all Product Managers to drive their area’s strategy. You’ll play a large role in creating and adopting a strategy around improving Resilience, Stability and Performance, as well as around how to balance across those investments and short-term customer needs.
  • Make hard decisions: Manage a roadmap by translating that strategy and customer feedback into targeted outcomes, collaborating with Engineering, Revenue and others to make hard prioritization (and deprioritization) decisions.
  • Drive value, not features: Before development starts, you’ll define success criteria and document customer end-to-end expectations. Throughout and after development, you’ll ensure the proper testing is completed – many times by you – to ensure we’re providing the value that customers need to be successful.
  • Bring that value to market: As the expert in the database’s core behaviors and best practices, you’ll partner with Engineering, Documentation, Marketing and 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 and Performance capabilities and characteristics. You will spin up ad hoc CockroachDB clusters, and test those capabilities and 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. You’ll read technical RFCs, Design Docs, and Technical Notes to deeply understand the mechanisms and use them to  explain the behaviors you experienced. You’ll review our current backlog and technical requests, get up to speed on in-flight features, and 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 and go-to-market approach, including tutorials and best practices. You will author Product Briefs, defining success requirements for database behavior during CPU saturation and collaborating with Engineers on testing setups to validate success. You’ll design the UX of new features, outlining the setup, maintenance and support user journeys and 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 and our most important customers’ operating teams to deeply understand their problems and explain to them the technological reasons they’re 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 and Performance can support and 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 and communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and 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 and address problems, set proper timelines and expectations around feature delivery to internal stakeholders and external teams
  • Experience driving business results through influential communication and cross-functional stakeholder management
  • A collaborative approach and an eagerness to partner with other product teams and all other functions in the company, such as Legal, Finance, Marketing, and 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 and 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, and 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 and fall outside of this range depending on factors such as a candidate’s qualifications, geographic location, skills, experience, and competencies. In addition, we are often open to a wide variety of profiles, and 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 and disability insurance, funds towards professional development resources, flexible PTO, paid holidays, and parental leave, to name a few! Salaries for candidates outside the U.S. will vary based on local compensation structures.

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