Companies like Cockroach Labs are first and foremost groups of people; people with passions and drives that go beyond what they do for work. This is, by and large, what drives organizations to consider how to best enable their staff to make an impact on their communities through volunteerism, donations, and action. As a company, we have emphasized doing good in our corporate giving initiatives: we match referral bonuses with an equivalent donation to a 501(c)(3) charity of our staff’s choice, run marketing campaigns geared towards amassing donations to groups such as Women Who Code and Black Girls Code, and establish an employee-led committee each year to decide where to donate a significant corporate gift. Still, many of our people have other ways of giving back. To give Roachers the time and space they need to be forces of good, we’ve established Connect and Contribute Days: company time dedicated for our people to learn, seek understanding, grow, volunteer, mobilize, or otherwise make a positive change.

As a startup, our policies and processes constantly evolve. All content in this post is true at the time of publication. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our careers page or reach out to recruiting@cockroachlabs.com Adjusting to a completely remote lifestyle to weather a pandemic has been no easy feat. For many of us, maintaining productivity has been even harder. Cockroach Labs is working hard to ensure that our people have what they need to take care of themselves and work effectively, no matter where they are. Our company was founded with a belief in establishing balance and flexibility at the core of our organizational philosophy. We say so proudly on our careers website: “We care about productivity, not face time.” This principle has driven how we put best practices in place surrounding remote work, asynchronous communication, and relocating throughout your career with us. We’re particularly proud of how this commitment has smoothed the quick transition to company-wide remote work at the height of COVID-19’s spread. Our foremost goal at the start of the pandemic was (and remains) to make sure that our team is safe and practicing vital social distancing measures. From our founding in 2015, most of our early team was based in New York City. Over time, as we began to hire Roachers in metro regions throughout the US, we spun up co-working spaces in those new cities. Later, we did the same in Toronto to bring our past interns from Canada on board! Opening these offices meant welcoming more talent from more parts of the world and we’re happy to do so. As we’ve expanded our sales team, we’ve started hiring for revenue roles in the UK, too. We will continue to evaluate new regions as we grow, but we’ve confirmed an important hypothesis: a scaling workforce can still build the world’s best distributed database.

Working at a startup presents a number of challenges for hiring. You have limited resources, you’re lesser-known to those outside of your industry, and you innovate at breakneck speed, making it difficult to articulate what you do. In an industry where candidates are inundated with information, cutting through the noise requires new, ever-evolving strategy.