Strategy & Operations Manager, Office of the CEO - New York, San Francisco

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 looking for a Strategy and Operations Manager to partner with the CEO and Chief of Staff in both setting company and division-level strategy and helping teams execute against that strategy. In this role, you will work closely with members of the executive team (e.g. the CRO and CMO if focusing on go-to-market, or the CTO and CPO if focusing on R&D) - driving annual planning, quarterly performance assessment and target-setting and continuous improvement. As an early member of the team, you will have the opportunity to work with the Chief of Staff to build out the central strategy and operations function at Cockroach Labs.

You Will

• Serve as a trusted advisor to the CEO on strategy in one or more areas of the business, and develop a strong, independent, data-driven point of view on the state of Cockroach Labs GTM and/or R&D.
• Partner with executive leadership to drive quarterly goal-setting for a major part of the organization, using the OKR framework. Extend this work to mid-year and annual planning.
• Partner with operations leaders (e.g. for the GTM org: Revenue Operations, Marketing Operations, and Data Engineering) to ensure that the CEO and executive team have an up-to-date understanding of the KPIs that measure the health of our business and the Key Results that show how our strategy is playing out. Identify and execute ad-hoc analyses based on feedback from Executive review of KPIs / KRs.
• Lead or support cross-functional initiatives that require collaboration between divisions (e.g. Sales and Marketing, or Product and Sales Engineering)
• Help build the central strategy function at Cockroach Labs; over time, this may include internal communications, M&A, IPO prep, etc.

The Expectations

In your first quarter, you will immerse yourself in the executive operating model, and will support regular operational reviews and mid-quarter / end-of-quarter OKR reviews as you build a deep understanding of one area of our business. By the end of the first quarter, you’ll add to the executive-level conversation by performing deep primary research and analysis to answer questions and challenge conventional wisdom.

In your first year, you will step in to lead, or help lead, major projects with unclear owners and/or significant cross-functional dependencies, allowing the Office of the CEO to bring the ‘best of Cockroach’ to our highest-priority initiatives.

In the long-term, you will have the opportunity to help build out the strategy and operations function at ‘public company scale’, or move into a leadership role in the business.

You Have

• 5+ years of experience; 3+ years of demonstrated success in a role with significant executive exposure (e.g. Business Operations, Strategy, Chief of Staff, Consulting, Investment Banking, etc.)
• Executive-level communication skills, in both written and verbal form
• Analytical mindset; you gravitate towards a data-driven approach even in complex, ambiguous situations
• Self-Starter. Ability to identify and execute opportunities with limited guidance.
• Strong sense of self-awareness, can relate well, learns quickly, and adapts to changes while remaining calm under pressure
• Nice to have: experience with enterprise SaaS go-to-market, and/or the database and broader digital infrastructure market

The Team

Nikhil Joshi - Chief of Staff

Nikhil joined Cockroach Labs in 2021 as the company’s first Chief of Staff, and is responsible for helping the CEO and Executive team set company-level strategy, drive execution, and continuously improve based on our results. Nikhil learned the potential of cloud computing to transform industries at Google Cloud, where he led strategy and operations for the financial services industry vertical. Prior to Google, Nikhil helped establish the Strategy and Operations function at LendingClub and, earlier in his career, was a management consultant at Bain & Co. He lives on New York’s Lower East Side and enjoys getting outdoors and working on his tennis game in preparation for the next Camp Roach showdown.

Spencer Kimball - Co-founder & CEO

Spencer strives to maintain a delicate balance between his love for programming distributed systems and the excitemen