Member of Technical Staff (Senior - Specialized Indexing)

The role

You will design, build, and maintain specialized indexing features like vector, full-text, and geospatial indexing for CockroachDB. You will work on the SQL Queries team to improve performance and reliability of indexing systems and develop hybrid search capabilities.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain specialized indexing features for CockroachDB, including vector, full-text, and geospatial indexing.
• Improve the performance and reliability of existing vector indexing systems, including backfill, query planning, and import workflows.
• Partner with other database teams to integrate new indexing mechanisms into the query engine.
• Develop hybrid search capabilities that combine vector similarity and text-based search.
• Participate in design discussions, code reviews, and release planning within the SQL organization.
• Take full ownership of work from design through implementation, testing, and release.

Required qualifications

• Passion for databases, indexing systems, and high-performance distributed architectures.
• Strong background in backend or systems programming.
• Experience working on indexing or query execution systems such as vector, text, or spatial search.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Curiosity about AI-driven and hybrid workloads that combine structured and unstructured data.
• Focus on building reliable, maintainable, and high-performance software.
• Collaborative mindset and ability to work effectively with a distributed global team.
• Typically 10+ years of experience building large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous problems into scalable, production-grade AI-enabled solutions.
• A builder's instinct for reuse and extensibility.
• Clear judgment about where AI should be deeply integrated and where traditional approaches are more reliable.

Nice to have

• Go, C/C++, or Rust

Benefits

• Medical Insurance
• Flexible Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• Mental Wellbeing Benefits
• Internet Reimbursement
• Wellness Allowance
• Food Allowance
• Office Commute Reimbursement

About the company

Cockroach Labs has built database technology trusted to power some of the world's most mission-critical applications. The company is building Cockroach Continuum to meet the needs of agentic applications.