Staff Product Manager

Category-defining tech. Career-defining work.

Lots of tech companies disrupt. But, many fail when they try to scale. We're different. CockroachDB makes it easier for companies to build and scale apps. This is how and why we're helping some of the most innovative companies on the planet. We tackle problems head-on and focus on solutions that create lasting impact. 

Because when our customers win, we all win. 

The Role

We are looking for a seasoned Product Manager to own the end-to-end CockroachDB Efficient & Always-on Transactions user journey — the core of what CockroachDB promises its customers. You will define the strategy, product direction, and measurable outcomes that enable CockroachDB to deliver globally consistent, highly available, horizontally scalable, and low-latency transactions at any scale — from single-region deployments to distributed, multi-region architectures designed to survive regional failures without compromising consistency or performance.

This is a highly technical, deeply customer-centric role that requires systems thinking, sharp problem definition, and strong cross-functional leadership. You will leverage both qualitative and quantitative data, including TCO benchmarks, latency distributions, CPU and storage efficiency metrics, to guide prioritization, validate hypotheses, and drive data-backed decisions. Your work will directly address the critical gaps that prevent architects from standardizing on CockroachDB, DBAs and SREs from trusting it operationally, and developers from optimizing it independently. This is the "why CockroachDB" story: resilience, consistency, scale, and speed, all delivered globally, always on, and without compromise. You will set the standard by which all CockroachDB functionality is evaluated: does it support a fully always-on, multi-region database experience for mission-critical workloads?

You Will 

• Own the end-to-end journey. Lead the full lifecycle of performance, reliability, cost efficiency, and multi-region capabilities, from competitive evaluation and initial adoption through operational trust and broad expansion. This includes CockroachDB's foundational always-on promise: surviving regional failures without data loss, enabling low-latency reads and writes globally, and delivering strict consistency at planetary scale. Define metrics to measure price-performance improvements, multi-region survivability, plan stability, and support ticket ratios to surface gaps and drive continuous improvement across all customer personas: Architects, DBAs, SREs, and Developers.
• Build a problem-first, data-driven strategy. Deeply understand the economic and operational pain customers face: TCO that blocks broader adoption of CockroachDB in enterprises, scale limits, and the complexity of running globally distributed, multi-region workloads with strict latency SLOs and data domiciling requirements. Define a roadmap balancing storage and CPU efficiency, plan stability, competitive benchmarking, SQL diagnostics, contention reduction, and multi-region capabilities — including survivability modes, low-latency global reads, and geo-partitioning. Prioritize using a combination of qualitative customer signals and quantitative performance data.
• Deliver measurable outcomes. Set and track success metrics spanning competitive win rates in TCO-centric deals, expansion into broader workloads, reduction in latency-related support tickets, and internal efficiency benchmarks. Ensure product changes deliver real, validated value and iterate rapidly when they don't. 
• Lead with clarity and customer centricity. Act as the voice of the customer — particularly Architects who need rigorous TCO justification, and DBAs/SREs who need operational predictability — in all strategic decisions. Communicate complex performance and infrastructure trade-offs clearly across Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Executives, aligning teams around a coherent narrative: CockroachDB is not just the most resilient database, but also the most trustworthy and operationally efficient one.
• Apply an AI-first mindset. Use AI to accelerate insights, improve product quality, and increase the efficiency of delivering customer value. Identify opportunities to bring AI-assisted query diagnosis, automated plan management, and intelligent self-remediation into the product roadmap as longer-term investments that reduce the "black box" experience customers describe today.

The Expectations

In the first 30–60 days, you will go through PM onboarding with your onboarding mentor (Roachmate). You will familiarize yourself with CockroachDB's current performance, storage, and CPU efficiency capabilities and how they map to the Efficient & Always-on Transactions user journey. You will spin up Cloud clusters — including multi-region deployments — run benchmark workloads (e.g., sysbench OLTP read-write), and experience the end-to-end diagnosis workflow firsthand, from identifying a slow query to understanding plan changes and contention. You'll test CockroachDB's survivability modes, explore geo-partitioning and zone configurations, and develop an intuition for the latency trade-offs inherent in globally distributed transactions. You'll review the existing backlog, get up to speed on in-flight initiatives, and align with Engineering leads across various teams.

After 90 days, you will be fully integrated into the team. You will have conducted customer calls to deeply understand their scaling challenges, TCO concerns, and operational anxieties. You will own the strategy, and a prioritized roadmap with clear problem statements backed by competitive benchmark data and customer evidence. As the owner of an integral part of our product's growth story, you will advise senior leadership on how efficiency and reliability investments support expansion into standard workloads and improve adoption. You will partner closely with Sales to ensure TCO narratives are validated, field-ready, and directly tied to product capabilities you are shipping.

You Have

• A computer science degree and/or first-hand experience building products focused on databases, distributed systems, performance engineering, or infrastructure
• 7+ years of total work experience with enterprise or SaaS products
• Proven track record of improving user journeys while leveraging both qualitative and quantitative data
• Delivered successful customer-facing products or features by partnering with senior Engineering teams in a fast-moving environment
• Background working directly with medium-to-large enterprises — understanding their operational and economic constraints, setting proper timelines, and managing expectations with internal stakeholders and external teams
• Experience driving business results through influential communication and cross-functional stakeholder management across Engineering, PMM, Sales, and Finance
• A collaborative approach and eagerness to partner with other product teams and all functions in the company, including Legal, Finance, Marketing, and Sales

Nice to Haves

• An MBA and/or experience working with business stakeholders (e.g., Sales, Revenue)
• Familiarity with distributed systems architectures

The Team

Reporting to Lakshmi Kannan, Sr. Director of Product Management. 

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 [email protected].

Cockroach Labs has a hybrid work model, with Roachers that are local to one of our offices coming in on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and working flexibly the rest of the week. While we’ve learned valuable lessons working remotely, nothing can replace the connection, creativity, and fun that occurs when Roachers get together and we are committed to fostering a workplace that encourages collaboration and allows us all to do our best work.

Benefits

• Stock Options
• Medical Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Life and Disability Insurance
• Professional Development Funds
• Flexible Time Off
• Paid Holidays
• Paid Sick Days
• Paid Parental Leave
• Retirement Benefits
• Mental Wellbeing Benefits
• And more!