Senior Engineering Manager (Key Value)

Join Cockroach Labs as a Senior Engineering Manager, leading the Key Value (KV) layer of CockroachDB. You'll manage a team of around ten engineers, drive the roadmap, and represent the team externally. The role requires project management skills, experience leading distributed teams, a deep technical foundation, high emotional intelligence, and a genuine interest in distributed systems and databases.

• Lead and manage a team of engineers working on the Key Value (KV) layer of CockroachDB, overseeing projects and ensuring alignment across multiple time zones.
• Drive the roadmap for the KV team, partnering with Engineering and Product leadership to plan, prioritize, and ship multi-quarter projects across subdomains.
• Represent the team externally at tech talks, conferences, and meetups, showcasing the team's work to the broader database and distributed systems community.
• We're looking for an experienced engineering manager who can keep a savvy engineering team aligned across a complex, deeply technical, multi-project roadmap
• Project management chops. You can keep multiple large, technically dense workstreams moving in parallel, without micromanaging
• Distributed-team fluency. You've led teams across time zones and know how to make async work for high-context engineering and knowledge work
• Deep technical foundation. Ideally a background in databases or systems infrastructure (storage, compute, networking). You can hold your own in design discussions, push back on trade-offs, and earn the respect of senior ICs. You don't need to write code daily, but you'll want to
• High EQ. You build trust through empathy and consistency. You're comfortable in the weeds when needed, and you don't confuse leadership with distance from the work
• Genuine interest in the domain. Distributed systems and databases aren't a stop on a career path for you. They're work you find interesting
• Proven Engineering Management chops. 5+ years managing software engineering teams. Manager / Senior Manager (T6/T7) equivalent today. You've driven projects from prototype to production. Developed and coached engineers, driven promotions. Made tough decisions