Sr. Director, Product Marketing

San Mateo, CA (Hybrid)

$300K/yr – $330K/yrDirector/ExecutiveFull time

Posted 4 months ago

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Job Summary

Lead enterprise PMM to translate CockroachDB’s tech into CIO-facing value and drive sales enablement across cloud, AI, and cost narratives.

  • Own messaging across eval-to-expansion, tailored to architects, developers, and enterprise buyers.
  • Must-have: PMM leadership with enterprise infrastructure experience.
  • Standout: Proven ability to accelerate deals with competitive enablement and business-friendly storytelling.

Job Description

Responsibilities

  • Rewrite the CockroachDB narrative in customer language. Today our story is told in database terms. You'll translate it into the language of architects and CIOs: "Your database will never go down. It works everywhere your customers are. And it costs less than what you're running today." You'll develop, test, and enforce this messaging across every channel, ensuring it resonates across personas such as developers, platform engineers, architects, and enterprise buyers, and throughout the full lifecycle from evaluation through adoption to expansion.
  • Win the cost narrative. CockroachDB has achieved 50%+ TCO reductions with more radical simplifications coming. You'll build TCO models, cost-comparison tools, and campaigns that give Sales a new competitive weapon against Aurora and Oracle.
  • Own the "AI Infrastructure Database" position. OpenAI, CoreWeave, and other leading AI companies run on CockroachDB for mission-critical operational state. You'll develop and own the narrative that CockroachDB is the operational backbone for AI companies, a genuinely differentiated story no competitor can tell.
  • Make Sales unstoppable. Build concise, actionable competitive enablement for Aurora, Oracle, and Spanner. Create vertical-specific deal accelerators. Deliver translation training that teaches AEs to sell in business language. Build POC success guides and migration risk-reduction frameworks that accelerate deal cycles.
  • Activate the customer base as an awareness engine. Turn marquee logos into speaking opportunities, case studies with quantified outcomes, press quotes, and video testimonials. One CTO on stage saying "we chose CockroachDB because our old database couldn't survive a region failure" is worth more than a year of blog posts.
  • Drive decisions with data. Set and track success metrics such as win rates vs. competitors, pipeline influenced by PMM initiatives, product adoption, content engagement. Use win/loss analysis, competitive intelligence, and attribution data to guide prioritization and measure impact. Iterate when results fall short.
  • Build effective operations. Install operating rhythms, launch playbooks, enablement cadences, and measurement systems. Define roles, set priorities, and create a culture of execution.
  • Operate as part of a unified R&D organization. You'll report to the VP of Product and work as a genuine partner to Product Management and Education. PMM attends product planning, knows the roadmap 2 quarters out, and authors a "so what" for every feature that ships. You'll embed PMM early and continuously in the product development lifecycle and scale it as a company-wide capability, not a siloed function.
  • Build analyst relations over time. Analyst coverage (Gartner, Forrester) is not a day-one priority, but it matters for enterprise credibility. Once the PMM foundation is in place, you'll build this capability to secure favorable positioning in industry evaluations.

Requirements

  • PMM team builder. You've scaled PMM operations from at a $50M–$500M ARR enterprise infrastructure or developer tools company. You built the operating model, not just inherited one.
  • Enterprise infrastructure experience. You've marketed technical products to developers, architects, CTOs, and CIOs. You're comfortable in the room with deeply technical buyers and can hold your own without being an engineer yourself.
  • Sales enablement track record. You've built enablement programs that Sales actually used and that measurably improved win rates or deal velocity. You understand what AEs need in the field, not just what looks good in a slide deck.
  • Technical-to-business translation ability. You can take a complex technical capability and express it in language that a CIO acts on. You instinctively rewrite "geo-partitioned leaseholder rebalancing" as "your app is fast everywhere your customers are."
  • Analytical rigor. You use data, win/loss analysis, product analytics, pipeline attribution, to inform strategy and measure impact. You're not just a storyteller; you prove what's working and kill what isn't.
  • Execution discipline. You ship. You prioritize ruthlessly. You know that with a small team, doing 3 things well beats doing 10 things poorly. You hold yourself and your team to commitments.
  • Cross-functional operating model experience. You've operated PMM as a tightly integrated function within Product or R&D. You know how to embed PMMs in product development cycles and build joint deliverables with Education and Sales teams.

Preferred

  • Economic modeling comfort. You can build or direct the creation of TCO comparison tools and cost-savings analyses. You're not intimidated by spreadsheets, pricing models, or ROI calculations.
  • Cloud displacement experience. You've marketed against cloud-native default databases (Aurora, DynamoDB, Spanner) and know how to overcome "good enough + already on AWS" inertia.
  • Category creation experience. You've defined or redefined a product category at a prior company, not just positioned within an existing one.
  • AI infrastructure market understanding. You understand what AI companies need from their infrastructure stack.
  • Competitive intelligence system builder. You've built (not just contributed to) a structured competitive intel program with win/loss cadences, battlecards, and sales feedback loops that measurably moved win rates.

Benefits

  • Stock Options
  • Medical Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Life and Disability Insurance
  • Professional Development Funds
  • Flexible Time Off
  • Paid Holidays
  • Paid Sick Days
  • Paid Parental Leave
Cockroach Labs logo

Cockroach Labs

3.6 Glassdoor

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the cloud native, distributed SQL database enterprises trust to run mission-critical applications that scale
fast, survive disaster, and thrive everywhere.

Founded in 2015
New York, New York, USA
720 employees (52 in marketing)
57% recommend to a friend
72% CEO approval

Traffic Signals

Monthly Visitors
206.1K
Traffic Source Mix
Search
50.3%
Direct
36.6%
Referral
8.8%
Social
3.4%
Paid
0.9%

Headcount Trend

Current headcount: ~721

Marketing Team

Marketing Team Size
36 (5% of company)
Marketing Roles Posted (Last 30 Days)
1

Funding

Total Funding
$633.1M
Last Raise
$278M
Series F, 4 years ago

Funding History

  • Dec 2021
    Series F • $278M
  • Jan 2021
    Series E • $160M
  • May 2020
    Series D • $86.6M

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