Value Engineer, Solutions Engineering

Category-defining tech. Career-defining work. The next era of software won’t operate at human scale. Applications will create applications. Systems will coordinate with systems. Data and decisions will move faster than teams can react to them. The infrastructure powering that world cannot be fragile, reactive, or limited by the assumptions of the past. Cockroach Labs exists to build what comes next — before the world requires it. We created CockroachDB to survive failures, scale without compromise, and adapt to changing conditions automatically. Now we’re helping define a future where complexity fades into the background and infrastructure simply works, no matter the scale. This is the kind of challenge that attracts people who want to shape industries, not just participate in them. The work is ambitious, the standards are high, and the impact is real. 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, TCO/ROI templates, pain-to-value taxonomy, and champion decks Produce at least one piece of Value Engineering thought leadership for external publication Enable the broader field on Value Engineering methodol