Member of Technical Staff

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

Cockroach Labs is looking for a software engineer to join Code Systems, part of our Engineering Productivity organization based in India. Code Systems builds and operates roachdev, CRL's unified infrastructure for running coding agents and automating engineering workflows across the company - from an engineer's laptop, to worker VMs, to stateless cloud agents triggered by GitHub, Slack, and Mica.

This role has shifted from a traditional DevOps/developer-infrastructure profile to one centered on general software engineering and applied AI. You'll spend most of your time building and hardening AI-powered developer tools - building AI automated code review, CI failure triage, and agentic automation - rather than just managing build systems or CI infrastructure in isolation. You'll still need working knowledge of CI/CD and developer workflows, but the emphasis is on shipping product-quality software that happens to serve engineers as its customers.

Success in this role means designing and building reliable, observable systems that put AI agents safely in the loop of everyday engineering work, and collaborating closely with engineering teams across CRL to roll them out.

Our team values

• Providing high-quality support to Cockroach Labs engineering teams and a strong desire to help other people work more productively.
• Engaging with other Cockroach Labs engineers to build relationships, listen to developer pain points, and identify opportunities to apply AI and automation to real workflows.
• Minimizing and automating away toil - including the toil of using AI safely and reliably.
• Shipping incrementally, measuring quality with real data, and being honest about where AI tooling still needs a human in the loop.

Some examples of work the team is doing

• Building roachdev's AI code review pipeline - migrating CRL's major repositories (cockroach, pebble, managed-service) off third-party review tools (BugBot, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code Action) onto our own AI-driven PR review system.
• Adding observability to AI review: surfacing findings, confidence scores, and token/cost metrics as build artifacts, backed by an event gateway that routes GitHub webhooks through Pub/Sub and a metrics pipeline for quality comparison.
• Building a CI triage agent that automatically investigates failed builds, scores suspect PRs by file overlap, and posts a verdict (e.g. revert recommended, likely flake, likely infra) to Slack - cutting the time engineers spend manually bisecting broken builds.
• Extending Blathers (our GitHub/Jira automation bot) to safely auto-merge low-risk PRs for teams like test-eng, gated on code ownership, AI review sign-off, and green CI.
• Supporting company-wide initiatives such as the transition of CockroachDB's source to private repositories, including tooling to safely duplicate/rebase PRs across repos and guard against leaking sensitive data on public repos.
• Maintaining and evolving the GitHub-Jira issue sync system (Exalate) and the CLA-checker service, and evaluating what of that surface area can be modernized, simplified, or replaced outright.

The ideal candidate will have solid, general software engineering fundamentals, genuine curiosity about applying LLMs/AI agents to real engineering problems, and enough familiarity with CI/CD, GitHub automation, and cloud infrastructure to reason about where AI tooling plugs into the developer workflow. You should enjoy moving between problems - one week you might be improving an agent's prompt and evals, the next you might be debugging a GitHub webhook pipeline or a Cloud Run service.

You Will

• Design, build, and operate AI-powered developer tools on top of roachdev - including automated code review, CI failure triage, and agentic PR automation.
• Build the observability and quality-measurement systems that let us trust and improve AI agents in production (metrics pipelines, dashboards, review-incorporation checks).
• Work directly with GitHub's API/Apps platform, webhooks, and CI systems (GitHub Actions, TeamCity) to safely automate engineering workflows.
• Partner with engineering teams across CRL to roll out new AI tooling, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.
• Maintain and modernize existing Code Systems services (issue sync/Exalate, CLA checker) with an eye toward reducing their operational footprint.
• Provide direct, service-minded support to engineers who hit issues with our tools, primarily in Go and Python.
• Contribute to roachdev's shared skill library and provider abstractions used by coding agents across the company.

The Expectations

In the first month, you will become an integrated member of the Code Systems team. You'll spend your first couple of weeks learning how Cockroach Labs' engineering organization works, getting familiar with roachdev's architecture, and understanding the AI code review and CI triage systems already in production. You'll start with small, well-scoped tasks before taking on a larger starter project.

In your second month, you'll take on a medium-sized project - for example, extending the AI review pipeline's observability, improving an agent's reliability, or modernizing a piece of the Exalate/CLA surface area - partnered with one or more teammates to plan and deliver it.

By the end of the third month, you'll be a fully contributing member of Code Systems, having owned and shipped one or more medium-sized projects end to end. You'll be able to propose and scope new work, engage with other engineers across CRL to support our tools, and reason about trade-offs between AI-driven and traditional automation approaches.