Value Engineer, Solutions Engineering

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. The customers you’ll work with are some of the most innovative businesses in the world, and the problems they’re trying to solve are real and urgent. You’ll bring a genuinely differentiated product to a market moving fast, at a company positioned to lead it. The people who thrive here are the ones who want to own that opportunity. The Role The Value Engineer at Cockroach Labs is a strategic advisor embedded within our Solution Engineering organization, working directly with Account Executives, Sales Engineers, and Customer Success Managers to quantify and communicate the financial impact of adopting CockroachDB. You'll engage directly with customer IT Directors, CTOs, CFOs, and other senior executives, designing and delivering custom Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models that translate complex technical advantages into compelling financial narratives. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role that sits at the intersection of finance, technology, and consultative sales. You'll help customers across banking, payments, gaming, retail, and high technology make confident, data-driven decisions about their infrastructure investment, and you'll help build the Value Engineering practice at Cockroach Labs from the ground up. You Will ROI and TCO Modeling: Design and deliver custom, bottoms-up financial models that quantify the business value of migrating to or standardizing on CockroachDB. Models will account for infrastructure spend, operational overhead, licensing, developer productivity, and risk mitigation, calibrated to each customer's actual environment. Executive-Level Storytelling: Lead whiteboard sessions, executive presentations, and boardroom discussions that translate CockroachDB's technical advantages into financial narratives tied to P&L impact, capital efficiency, and long-term competitive advantage. Your audience is both the CFO and the CTO; you have to be credible with both. Customer Discovery: Conduct meaningful discovery with senior customer stakeholders to understand how their current database landscape (legacy RDBMS, NoSQL, or managed cloud) is creating cost drag, operational fragility, or scalability constraints, and how CockroachDB addresses those challenges. Field Enablement: Build and maintain the Value Engineering practice: customer discovery guides, technical-to-business pain taxonomy, ROI/TCO templates, champion decks, and win stories. Enable the broader SE and AE teams to apply the framework confidently and independently. Deal Support: Attend Global Evaluation Pit Stops to coach and validate business cases for active opportunities. Partner closely with Sales Engineers and Account Executives to accelerate deal velocity and expand strategic accounts. Product Feedback Loop: Serve as a conduit between customer conversations and the Product organization, synthesizing patterns in TCO and ROI discussions to provide direct input to the product roadmap and help shape the compelling database economics that can be unlocked through product enhancements. The Expectations In your first 6 months • Develop an engagement strategy and collaboration model with field teams (AEs, SEs, CSMs) • Build the foundation of the Value Engineering practice: customer discovery guides,