Sr. Engineering Manager, Key Value KV

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

Every transaction CockroachDB handles - billions a day, across global banks, payments networks, retailers, and SaaS platforms - moves through the Key Value (KV) layer of the database. This includes CockroachDB’s distributed transaction protocol, its replication layer (which uses Raft consensus), and its data placement allocator. The primitives on top of which CockroachDB is built.

You'll lead the team that owns this layer: around ten engineers working across multiple time zones, working on the fundamentals behind many of the headline features in recent CockroachDB releases - Leader Leases (a recent SIGMOD 2026 industry track paper), Buffered Writes, Read Committed transaction isolation. The KV team's work is technically dense, broad in scope, and interfaces with essentially every other Engineering team at Cockroach Labs.

We're looking for an experienced engineering manager who can keep a savvy engineering team aligned across a complex, deeply technical, multi-project roadmap.

You Will

• Lead the team. Manage projects, coach engineers, run the performance and growth process, and hire to maintain the technical bar and culture as the team evolves.
• Drive the roadmap. Along with the team’s technical leads, partner with Engineering and Product leadership to plan, prioritize, and ship multi-quarter projects across the team’s subdomains - replication, transactions, distribution, and resource management.
• Be the connective tissue with the rest of Database Engineering org. KV sits at the center of our product. The storage layer sits below, SQL sits on top, Backup, Restore and Changefeeds (CDC) move data through it. You'll keep those interfaces healthy - technically and organizationally.
• Run a portfolio of highly technical projects. The team's domain is broad and deep. You'll keep several large, parallel projects on track without losing the technical details that matter.
• Represent the team externally. Tech talks, conferences, meetups, hackathons - showing the team's work off to the broader database and distributed systems community.

The Expectations

• First 30 days. Embed in the team. Get to know each engineer, the technical sub-domains (replication, transactions, distribution, resource management), and the cross-functional partners you'll work with most.
• By 3 months. Running the team day to day, alongside the team’s tech leads and Product partners. S