Category-defining tech. Career-defining work.

For more than a decade, Cockroach Labs has built database technology trusted to power some of the world's most mission-critical applications. Now, as AI transforms how software is created and operated, the infrastructure behind it has to keep pace. Cockroach Continuum is built to meet this moment, bringing individual databases together into one fleet designed for agentic applications, where AI agents help teams provision, scale, and optimize workloads at machine speed.

At Cockroach Labs, you'll solve problems that didn't exist five years ago alongside people who believe the simplest solutions often require the most sophisticated thinking. Your work will run in production at some of the most innovative companies in the world. The people who thrive here are the ones who want to own that opportunity.

The Role

The Migrations team owns the full suite of MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) tooling: Convert, Fetch, Replicator, and Verify. We also recently launched the Migration Assistant, which brings the individual MOLT tools together into a single migration workflow which guides customers through moving their databases to CockroachDB and Cockroach Continuum. We're looking for a staff software engineer to help build out the Migration Assistant, expand the capabilities of the MOLT toolkit, and to drive innovation around how AI can be leveraged to further reduce friction during the migration process..

You'll report to Eric Alton, who leads the Migrations and Observability teams, and work closely with other engineers, SREs, and our product and design teams.

This role follows Cockroach Labs' hybrid model: Roachers local to an office come in Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and work flexibly the rest of the week.

You Will

Build and extend CockroachDB's migration tooling, including the Migration Assistant, to make migrating to CockroachDB effortless.
Apply AI to real migration problems in a way that ensures security of customer data and correctness of the migration workflow.
Help expand the capabilities of MOLT's Convert, Fetch, Replicator, and Verify tools into a single, cohesive migration experience.
Develop primarily in Go (we'll teach you if you don't know it) alongside engineers and PMs across the cloud and database teams.
Take part in a collaborative, technically rigorous culture, and help shape engineering practices on a growing team.

The Expectations

In the first month, you'll join the team and get familiar with our production systems, the MOLT tooling suite, the Migration Assistant's architecture, and how customers actually migrate to CockroachDB. Take the time to learn the technology, the team, and how we work before diving into big projects.

After 3 months, you'll be a full member of the team, contributing to the MOLT and Migration Assistant tooling ecosystem. You'll have a feel for where customers hit friction during migrations, and you'll work with your manager to point your efforts at the areas that matter most.

As the team grows and the Migration Assistant matures, you'll have real influence over where migration tooling at CockroachDB goes next, including how far we push AI to take the guesswork out of migrations. We also offer technical training and mentorship to help you grow in whatever direction you want.

You Have

A passion for complex technical products, and exposure to topics like distributed systems, data replication, concurrency control, file systems, or SQL processing.
Comfort with Go, C/C++, Java, or Python.
A strong grasp of system design for high-throughput data systems.
Experience with one or more database technologies (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2).
Experience and interest in designing and building systems and tools that leverage AI.
Good judgement about where AI should be integrated into a system and where traditional approaches are preferable.
A track record of strong collaboration and technical leadership; you enjoy collaborative brainstorming, design and code review, and pairing with teammates on hard problems.