Staff Product Marketing Manager, Developer Experience

United States Digital Space LLC; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Cockroach Labs seeks a Staff Product Marketing Manager to own the Onboard & Build stage across four journeys, centering how developers and their agents adopt CockroachDB. You’ll lead positioning, messaging, and enablement at the intersection of product, engineering, and go-to-market.

You’ll shape the AI-native adoption story, partnering with PMs, DevRel, docs, and demand gen to deliver compelling content and field-ready materials that accelerate developer success.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in product marketing for technical products.
• Genuine technical fluency in distributed systems, databases, and developer tools.
• Fluency in AI-native developer world (RAG, agent-driven workflows, MCP).
• Clear, opinionated PMM perspective with evidence.
• Strong technical storytelling focused on developers.

Responsibilities

• Define positioning & messaging for the Onboard & Build stage across all four journeys.
• Lead launches, messaging, enablement, and field readiness aligned to GTM plan.
• Develop field and sales enablement materials and objection handling.
• Shape and prove the AI-native adoption narrative with agent-driven stories.
• Collaborate with PMs, DevRel, docs, and demand gen to translate shipping features into market impact.
• Create case studies and technical content grounded in real customer outcomes.

Skills

8+ years in product marketing

Technical storytelling

AI-native developer world

Point of view / defend approach

Cross-functional collaboration

Decision-ready output

Job description

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

We're looking for a Staff Product Marketing Manager to own the Onboard & Build stage of the customer lifecycle — the moment a developer (or their agent) first meets CockroachDB and decides whether to build on it. It's the front door of our entire go-to-market motion: if we don't win here, nothing downstream matters.

You’ll own four connected user journeys end-to-end — Activation to Collaboration, Data Onboarding & Enablement, Developer Experiences, and Programmability & Extensibility — as a single, coherent stage rather than four disconnected pieces. That's deliberate: the developer's path from “curious” to “building in production” should feel like one story, and you're the person who makes it one.

This is a senior, high-ownership role. You'll set the positioning, build the messaging, and drive the enablement and content for how developers adopt CockroachDB — including the AI-native patterns increasingly defining this stage: agent-driven discovery, MCP and agent-facing surfaces, and the reality that coding agents themselves now evaluate and choose databases. You'll sit inside Product Marketing & DevRel within the R&D organization, close to engineering and on the roadmap early enough to shape the story, not just narrate it.

Below are the journeys you will own:

• Activation to Collaboration. The front line of the agentic strategy — how developers and their coding agents discover, evaluate, and choose CockroachDB. If an agent doesn't pick us at activation, nothing downstream happens; you own making sure we're the obvious choice.

• Data Onboarding & Enablement. The migration and onboarding story — how teams move off legacy databases and get to production, including the AI Migration Assistant and the MOLT tooling that de-risks the path.

• Developer Experiences. The end-to-end developer experience — quickstarts, docs, sample apps, and the surfaces that turn first-touch curiosity into a running application.

• Programmability & Extensibility. How developers extend and build on CockroachDB — the interfaces, integrations, and capabilities (SQL Server design partnerships, Dynamic SQL, and more) that make it a platform, not just a database.

You Will

• Positioning & messaging for the stage. Build the message house for Onboard & Build — the value propositions, proof points, and narrative that make developers choose and stay. Keep all four journeys laddering to one coherent story and to the broader company positioning.

• Launch & GTM execution. Own the PMM deliverables for launches touching your journeys — messaging, enablement, content, and field readiness — mapped to the GTM readiness plan and shipped on time. You move fast once positioning locks.

• Field & sales enablement. Arm the field to sell the onboarding and developer story — first-call decks, objection handling, competitive framing, and the pitch reps carry — partnering with the enablement team on delivery.

• The AI-native adoption story. Own how the agentic era shows up at this stage: agent-driven discovery, agents as a first-class audience, and the message that CockroachDB is where developers and their agents build. Turn it into proof, not just positioning.

• Cross-functional partnership. Work hand-in-glove with the PMs for each journey, with DevRel, docs, and demand gen — translating what's shipping into what the market hears, and bringing developer reality back into the roadmap.

• Proof and content. Drive the case studies, reference stories, and technical content that make the onboarding and build story credible — grounded in real customer outcomes, not claims.

The Expectations

• In your first 30 days, you'll go deep on the product and the four journeys, meet the PMs and cross-functional partners you'll work with, and audit the existing positioning, messaging, and content across Onboard & Build for gaps and quick wins.

• By 60 days, you'll have a clear point of view on where the stage's story is strong and where it's thin, shipped your first messaging or enablement deliverable, and begun driving one of the four journeys end-to-end.

• By 90 days, you'll own the full Onboard & Build narrative — a coherent message house across all four journeys, active field enablement, and a working partnership with the journey PMs feeding the roadmap.

You Have

• 8+ years in product marketing, with a track record of owning positioning, messaging, and launches for technical products — ideally databases, developer tools, data infrastructure, or cloud platforms (Staff level; senior candidates with exceptional depth considered).

• Genuine technical fluency. You can hold a real conversation with developers and PMs about distributed systems, databases, and how software gets built — and translate it into messaging that's both accurate and compelling. You don't fake the technical depth; you have it.

• Fluency in the AI-native developer world. You understand how developers build with LLMs and agents today — RAG, vector search, agent memory, MCP, agent-driven workflows — and can position data infrastructure credibly within it.

• A clear, opinionated point of view. You bring a strong PMM perspective and defend it with evidence. You'd rather challenge a weak positioning than execute it quietly, and you know how to disagree constructively.

• Sharp technical storytelling. You turn capability into meaning — “online schema changes” becomes “ship changes with zero downtime” — and you make the developer's life the center of the story.

• Bias for decision-ready output. You produce concise, high-quality work under real deadlines, flag decisions inline, and don't pad. You work fast when the direction is clear.

• Cross-functional gravity. You earn trust with PM