Cockroach Labs application questions — all 70, word for word
Cockroach Labs hires through Greenhouse. Beyond name, email and CV, its application form asks 70 questions, 55 of them required. 2 of them are required, fixed-choice questions about your eligibility to work. A cover letter is optional.
47 roles were open when this was last checked, mostly in engineering and sales. The questions below are the form's own wording, not a paraphrase.
What Cockroach Labs has open
These are the roles the form was read from, as Cockroach Labs titles them, in New York, NY, Bangalore, India, Remote, Singapore, London, UK:
- Deal Desk Manager, AMER
- Director, FP&A
- Executive Administrative Partner to the CEO
- Join our Talent Community!
- Marketing Operations Manager
- Member of Technical Staff (Senior - Specialized Indexing)
- Principal Partner Solutions Architect
- Sales Development Representative, Singapore
- Senior Staff Sales Engineer, Australia
- Sr. Corporate Security Engineer
- Staff Product Marketing Manager, Developer Experience
- Strategy and Operations Manager, GTM - EMEA
65 of the questions below are ones at most two of the 213 employers measured ask (median: 18), the least standard being “Have you hands-on implemented any of the following advanced bug-finding techniques in a production or research codebase — fuzzing (e.g., libFuzzer, go-fuzz, AFL++), metamorphic testing, property-based testing, or failure/fault injection (e.g., chaos-mesh, Chaos Monkey, Litmus)?”.
The eligibility questions
These are required, and answered from a fixed list rather than in your own words: work authorisation, visa sponsorship or security clearance. Employers often use questions like these to filter applications automatically, but Greenhouse's public data does not say whether Cockroach Labs does — so treat them as the answers most likely to matter, not as a verdict. Answer them honestly either way.
| Question | Answers accepted |
|---|---|
| Are you currently based in Singapore and legally authorized to work in Singapore without requiring employer sponsorship now or in the future? required, fixed choice | Yes, No |
| Are you currently based in Bangalore, India, or able to relocate immediately without sponsorship? required, fixed choice | Yes, I am currently based in Bangalore, Yes, I can relocate immediately without sponsorship, No |
Every question on the form
| Question | Type | Required |
|---|---|---|
| Are you currently based in Singapore and legally authorized to work in Singapore without requiring employer sponsorship now or in the future? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Are you currently based in Bangalore, India, or able to relocate immediately without sponsorship? Yes, I am currently based in Bangalore, Yes, I can relocate immediately without sponsorship, No |
select | Yes |
| First Name | text | Yes |
| Last Name | text | Yes |
| Preferred First Name | text | No |
| text | Yes | |
| Phone | text | Yes |
| Resume/CV | file | Yes |
| Cover Letter | file | No |
| LinkedIn Profile: | text | No |
| Please confirm that you are based in Singapore. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| How did you first hear about Cockroach Labs? Built In, Campus Event, Company Website, Facebook, Github, Glassdoor (+3 more) |
select | Yes |
| What was the largest influence on your decision to apply? Benefits & Perks, Company leadership, Company vision/mission, Culture/Values, Employer brand, The product (+1 more) |
select | Yes |
| Have you been employed by Cockroach Labs in the past? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| What are your salary expectations? | text | No |
| What additional accommodations do you need to feel comfortable during your interview process? All responses will be kept private. | textarea | No |
| Are you proficient in Mandarin? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you successfully sold database technologies or closely related infrastructure products (cloud platforms, data infrastructure, distributed systems, observability, DevOps, middleware, data platforms) into enterprise customers? Yes – Direct database sales experience, Yes – Adjacent infrastructure/platform technology sales experience, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you successfully sold enterprise technology solutions into Financial Services institutions or large conglomerates? Yes – Closed multiple deals, Limited exposure, No |
select | Yes |
| Website / GitHub: | text | No |
| You are located in NYC and understand our weekly in-office expectation of Monday, Tuesday & Thursday. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| What do you enjoy most about Deal Desk? | textarea | Yes |
| Please confirm you live near our [OFFICE_LOCATION] office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| LinkedIn Profile | text | No |
| Website / Github | text | No |
| Please confirm you live near our New York City office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. | text | Yes |
| Are you legally authorized to work in the country where the job is located? | text | Yes |
| Please confirm you live near our Austin, TX office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| What type of role are you interested in? G&A - Finance, G&A - Legal, G&A - People, Marketing - Content, Marketing - Creative, Marketing - Demand Generation (+15 more) |
select | Yes |
| Where are you currently located? | text | No |
| Where is your desired work location (if different than current location)? | text | No |
| Would you like to opt into receiving occasional content from the People team? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| How many years of hands-on experience do you have in SRE, Production Engineering, or a closely related discipline (e.g., Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering)? Less than 2 years, 2–4 years, 5–8 years, 8+ years |
select | No |
| Have you directly managed a team of software or infrastructure engineers (i.e., held formal people management responsibility including performance reviews, career development, and day-to-day coaching)? Yes, No, Not officially but have worked in a pseudo management role |
select | No |
| Which of the following best describes your experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management? I have no meaningful experience in any of these areas, I have academic or theoretical knowledge but limited production exposure, I have worked in a production environment using one or more of these (cloud infra, container orchestration, distributed systems, or fleet management), I have led engineering teams that owned one or more of these areas in production |
select | No |
| How many years of experience do you have leading or participating in production incident response at scale (e.g., on-call rotations, incident command, post-mortems)? I have not had this responsibility, Less than 2 years, 2–4 years, 4+ years |
select | No |
| Please confirm you live near our New York office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| How many years of professional software engineering experience do you have? Fewer than 3 years, 3–4 years, 5–7 years, 8 years or more, Auto-Reject Rule: Selected "Fewer than 3 years" OR "3–4 years" |
select | Yes |
| Do you have professional or significant project experience writing software in Go and/or Python? Yes – Go only, Yes – Python only, Yes – both Go and Python, No – I have experience in other languages but not Go or Python |
select | Yes |
| Have you personally built software that integrates LLMs or AI agents? (e.g., prompt engineering, evals, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines, AI-powered developer tooling) Yes – shipped to production or as a core part of a real-world project, Yes – built hands-on in a personal, side, or academic project, No – I have theoretical or academic knowledge only, but have not built with LLMs, No – I have no experience with LLMs or AI agents |
select | Yes |
| Which of the following have you worked with directly, in a professional or project context? GitHub REST or GraphQL API, GitHub Actions (writing or maintaining workflows), Building or extending a GitHub App or Bot, GitHub Webhooks, None of the above |
select | Yes |
| Which best describes your experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Jenkins, CircleCI)? Yes – I have built, configured, or actively debugged CI/CD pipelines, Yes – I have used CI/CD systems but only as a consumer (e.g., triggered builds, read logs), No – I have limited or no experience with CI/CD systems |
select | Yes |
| Please confirm you live near our New York, NY office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Is there anything additional you'd like us to know that was not already shared as part of this application? [optional] | textarea | No |
| Is there anything additional you'd like us to know that was not already covered in your application? [optional] | textarea | No |
| Please confirm you live near our Toronto or New York City office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Are you looking to work out of our Toronto or New York City Office? Toronto, New York City |
select | Yes |
| Is there anything additional you'd like us to know that was not already included in this application? [optional] | textarea | No |
| Please confirm you live near our Bangalore, India office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Walk me through your experience with database internals. Benefits & Perks, Company leadership, Company vision/mission, Culture/Values, Employer brand, The product (+1 more) |
select | Yes |
| Please confirm you live near our one of our office locations (either NYC, Toronto or San Mateo) and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Which office location would you prefer to work from? New York City, Toronto, San Mateo, California, I am not able or willing to work from any of those locations |
select | Yes |
| How would you best describe your experience with Bazel? I have designed and maintained complex Bazel build processes for production systems, I have used Bazel day-to-day but have not designed or owned build infrastructure, I have limited or no experience with Bazel |
select | Yes |
| How many years of professional experience do you have building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines? Less than 1 year, 1–2 years, 3–5 years, 5+ years |
select | Yes |
| Do you have hands-on cloud infrastructure experience on GCP or AWS? Yes, GCP, Yes, AWS, Yes, Azure, Yes, more than one of the above, No professional cloud infrastructure experience |
select | Yes |
| Which of the following best describes your experience with agentic AI development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot Workspace, or similar)? I have actively built, integrated, or extended agentic AI tools in a professional or open-source context, I use agentic AI tools regularly in my workflow but have not built or integrated them, I have minimal or no experience with agentic AI tools |
select | Yes |
| Which systems programming languages have you used in a professional or substantial project setting? Please select all that apply Go, Rust, C/ C++, Python, Java, I do not have experience with a systems programming language |
multiselect | Yes |
| Please confirm you live near our New York City or Austin office location and understand the in-office expectation of Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. | text | Yes |
| Have you designed and built a test infrastructure platform or automated test framework from scratch (not just used or extended existing ones like JUnit, pytest, or Go's testing package) that was adopted by an engineering organization? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you hands-on implemented any of the following advanced bug-finding techniques in a production or research codebase — fuzzing (e.g., libFuzzer, go-fuzz, AFL++), metamorphic testing, property-based testing, or failure/fault injection (e.g., chaos-mesh, Chaos Monkey, Litmus)? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you built (not just used) a static or dynamic analysis tool — such as an AST-based analyzer, concurrency/race condition detector, or taint analysis tool — that ran against a production codebase in a CI/CD pipeline? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you owned the design and execution of large-scale performance benchmarking or regression testing pipelines on GCP or AWS, involving multi-node clusters or distributed workloads? Yes, no |
select | Yes |
| How many years of full-time software engineering experience do you have writing production-quality code? Less than 5 years, 5–7 years, 8–10 years, 10+ years |
multiselect | Yes |
| Please provide a link to a piece of content (blog post, webinar, talk) that you are proud of and that is relevant to Cockroach Labs. | textarea | Yes |
| Please confirm you live a commutable distance from NYC or San Mateo. Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Where are you located? | text | Yes |
| How many years of people management experience do you have in a technical support or engineering environment? No people management experience, Less than 1 year, 1–2 years, 3–5 years, 5+ years |
select | Yes |
| Have you directly led incident response for a technical product, including coordinating cross-functional responders and owning stakeholder communication? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Do you have hands-on experience in a customer-facing technical support role for a complex software product? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| Do you have working experience with SQL, relational databases, or distributed systems? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| In 1-2 sentences, please tell us why you are excited to be applying to this role at Cockroach Labs. | textarea | Yes |
| How much professional experience do you have in a Sales Development, Business Development, or Lead Generation role where you were responsible for generating qualified sales opportunities? 1+ years, 6–12 months, Less than 6 months, No relevant experience |
select | Yes |
| Are you based in Singapore? Yes, No |
select | Yes |
| How much professional experience do you have in a Sales Development, Business Development, or Lead Generation role with responsibility for generating qualified sales pipeline? 1+ years, 6–12 months, Less than 6 months, No relevant experience |
select | Yes |
| Have you personally executed multi-channel outbound prospecting—including account research, cold email/calling, prospect prioritization, and qualification—to generate qualified opportunities against a target? Yes – Regularly owned these activities and had a qualified opportunity/pipeline target, Yes – Conducted outbound prospecting but did not own a target, Primarily handled inbound leads, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you worked in Sales Development or Lead Generation for a B2B SaaS or technical software product? Yes – B2B technical SaaS/software, Yes – B2B, but non-technical product/service, B2C sales experience only, No |
select | Yes |
| Have you regularly used a CRM (e.g., Salesforce) together with sales prospecting/engagement tools to manage leads, outbound activity, qualification, and opportunity handoffs? Yes – Regular hands-on use of both CRM and prospecting/engagement tools, CRM experience only, Prospecting tools only, No |
select | Yes |
What it's really asking about
Grouped by what each question is for, so you can prepare the answers that repeat across employers.
| Topic | Questions |
|---|---|
| Other | 43 |
| Remote or on-site | 11 |
| Years of experience | 6 |
| Portfolio and links | 4 |
| Visa sponsorship | 2 |
| Cover letter | 1 |
| Salary expectations | 1 |
| Voluntary diversity questions (EEOC) | 1 |
| Work authorisation | 1 |
What other employers ask
The same question rarely comes out the same way twice. These employers' forms are measured the same way, from their own job boards:
Mixpanel · Modern Health · Mongodb · Monzo · Mozilla · Myfitnesspal
Before you apply
Have the answers to the required questions ready before you open the form — Cockroach Labs's asks for 55 of them, and Greenhouse does not save a partial application by default. Settle the eligibility questions first — they are the ones with no room to elaborate, so knowing your answer before you start tells you whether the rest of the form is worth your time.