Cockroach Labs jobs, judged for you, free

What they do

Cockroach Labs makes CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database. It can lose a machine, a data center, or a region without losing transactions. Banks, payment networks, and health systems run on it. Continuum, a newer product, runs many databases as one fleet. Former Google engineers started the company in 2015, and it is based in New York City.

What they value

• Win with customers.
• Build the future.
• Achieve together, with understanding over ego.
• Own the outcome, and deliver with urgency.
• Earn opportunity through impact, not tenure.

Where they hire

Most roles are in New York. Others are in Austin, San Mateo, Toronto, and London, and a few sales roles are remote in Singapore and Australia. Office staff come in on set days each week, and fully remote roles are few. India roles are in Bangalore, on database engineering teams. Visas are sponsored for select roles.

Teams and roles

Engineers join as Members of Technical Staff. The database is written in Go. Postings ask for distributed systems fundamentals, GCP or AWS, and comfort with AI-assisted development.

• Storage: Pebble, an LSM-tree storage engine for MVCC data.
• SQL Queries: vector, full-text, and geospatial indexes, and hybrid search.
• Test Engineering: randomized and deterministic testing, failure injection, static analysis for concurrency bugs, and benchmarks at scale. It is not a QA role.
• Developer Infrastructure: Bazel builds, CI, and internal AI development tools in Go and TypeScript.

The board has no product manager or product designer roles. Product marketing roles are at staff level in New York. The rest of the board is sales, support, and business roles.

What they look for

Cockroach Labs wants people who are meticulous, analytical, and precise. Engineers keep final authority over what reaches production, also when they use AI tools. New engineers learn CockroachDB and do a starter project before they own larger work. The interview steps are a recruiter call, a hiring manager interview, and structured technical or functional interviews.