Software Engineer, Engineering Productivity

Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world.

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet that scales fast, survives anything, and thrives anywhere. We created CockroachDB to unshackle teams from the constraints of their database. Join us on our mission to enable every developer to build world-changing applications!

About the Role

Cockroach Labs is hiring a software engineer for the Engineering Productivity team to support the internal tools infrastructure at Cockroach Labs.

The Engineering Productivity team builds development tools and infrastructure to enable and accelerate the work of Cockroach Labs engineers. The work that this team does has a broad-reaching impact on the engineering team of over 100 engineers who rely on these tools every day as well as other teams within the company that depend on our internal cloud infrastructure. The team owns a variety of development tools and systems that encompass the workflow of engineering teams, ranging from the CockroachDB build process to the CI pipeline to internal hosting infrastructure.

For this specific role, a majority of the focus will be on supporting the tools infrastructure for the Education team. The Education team is responsible for the free, online documentation and training that help developers learn and use CockroachDB.

We're looking for an experienced Software Engineer to develop and maintain the tools and infrastructure supporting all of the Education team's work, from our build and publishing pipelines to third-party integrations for external functionality. You'll work closely with technical writers and curriculum developers to understand the current tools, processes, and challenges and scope solutions. Everything you work on will have a direct and measurable impact on Cockroach Labs' business metrics and trajectory.

In addition to work on Education infrastructure, the candidate will work closely with other members of the Engineering Productivity team on development of internal tools.

The ideal candidate will have broad experience in unix, git workflows, automation, cloud infrastructure, and continuous integration, and will enjoy working on a variety of different problems from project to project. You should also enjoy providing direct support and help to colleagues, a "customer service" mindset is crucial for this role!

You Will

• Understand the daily workflows of engineers and technical writers across the team and identify improvements to increase productivity and reduce friction
• Manage and optimize the tools, infrastructure, and integrations for building and delivering our docs and training sites.
• Help manage our internal applications running on GCP and AWS
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers and web developers across the company for shared knowledge and best practices.

Example Projects

• Improve Netlify build times for public CRDB documentation and fix bugs in our Netlify deployment process
• Research and document how our auto-generated docs (e.g., the Cluster Settings and Function and Operators pages) work, while also formulating a solution for better maintaining said docs
• Automate common manual operational tasks for the docs team: publishing release notes and technical advisories, testing of sample code, generation of SQL command output

The Expectations

In the first month, you will become an integrated member of our engineering productivity team. You'll become familiar with our systems and software development workflows. We believe that it's essential for you to take this first month to become familiar with our technology and our company. In addition to becoming familiar with CockroachDB and Cockroach DB cloud, you'll learn about our Education tools and workflows. For example, you'll learn how we use GitHub, Jekyll, Algolia, and Netlify to build and publish our docs and you'll talk with writers and curriculum developers about their day-to-day work and challenges. You'll be given a small "starter project" to help you learn about a particular area.

After your first month, you'll move from learning our tools and workflows to optimizing and maintaining them, with a focus on the parts that are most critical to the education team's immediate productivity and success.

By the end of the third month, you will be a fully-contributing member of the Engineering Productivity team, having successfully owned and completed a medium-sized project. You will also have developed ownership of our docs infrastructure and will be proposing and scoping projects moving forward.

You Have

Desired experience level ranges from mid to senior level. At a minimum this role requires:

• 3+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Strong full-stack experience, including modern HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a backend programming language
• 1+ years of hands on experience with GCP or AWS
• 2+ years of experience writing development tools
• Ability to quickly pick up new skills and emerging technologies
• Experience with automation and scripting on unix
• Experience with git/github and release management
• Exceptional communication skills with a service mindset and desire to collaborate
• A BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

The Team

Reporting to Ken Liu - Director of Engineering

Ken Liu is an experienced engineering leader, having managed engineering teams at several high-growth startups in NYC. Prior, he worked in various industries as a software engineer including Novartis Pharmaceuticals, IEEE, and BMW. In his free time, he spends most of his energy keeping up with his two kids but occasionally likes to relive the 90s by rollerblading.

Isaac Wong - VP of Engineering

Isaac is responsible for the health of the engineering organization at Cockroach Labs. He partners closely with teams to ensure we have a balanced culture that promotes quality and innovation in pursuit of our goals. Before joining Cockroach Labs Isaac was in life sciences for 16 years with Medidata Solutions where he had a front row seat on the exciting ride from a 30 person startup to more than 2000 people worldwide. But the lure of distributed, resilient, and consistent SQL databases, along with the amazing technology and culture at Cockroach Labs proved too much. When not working he likes to draw, play the piano, and search NYC for cannoli's with his wife and kids.

Our Benefits

• 100% health insurance coverage (for you and your dependents!)
• Paid parental leave (with baby bucks)
• Flex Fridays
• Flexible time off & flexible hours
• Education reimbursement
• Relocation support
• Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce.