Manager, Technical Support (APAC)

The Manager, Technical Support leads our Bangalore-based team of Technical Support Engineers, who own technical support operations during the APAC business day as part of a global, follow-the-sun support organization. You will be responsible for the success of the people on the team and for the quality and timeliness of the support they deliver to customers running CockroachDB in production.

This role also serves as the APAC Incident Manager for customer incidents. When a customer-facing incident occurs in your region, whether a Priority incident involving an outage or a long-running, cross-functional issue, you will take command: coordinating responders across Support, Escalation Engineering, Engineering, and account teams, owning stakeholder communication, and driving the incident to resolution and through its retrospective. You will be the person in the region who gets the full picture and decides what to do.

You Will

Lead the team

• Lead, mentor, and motivate a team of Technical Support Engineers, providing the resources, context, and connections they need to do their best work.
• Manage staffing and shift coverage to ensure adequate regional coverage and response times, including the APAC on-call rotation.
• Monitor and report on support metrics such as response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction, and act on what the data shows.
• Set performance goals, monitor progress, and conduct regular performance evaluations; coach and give direct feedback that develops people beyond technical skills.
• Build a team that wins with customers, achieves together, and owns the outcome, and hold yourself to the same standard.
• Stay current on CockroachDB, Cockroach Continuum, and industry trends so you can provide expert guidance to the team and to customers.

Manage customer incidents

• Act as Incident Manager for customer incidents originating in or handed off to the APAC region, assuming any incident role that has not yet been delegated.
• Coordinate the response: assemble the right responders, delegate roles, prioritize tasks, and keep the response in control from declaration to resolution.
• Own incident communication: deliver clear, periodic updates to internal stakeholders (account teams, Escalation Engineering, Engineering, Support leadership) and ensure customer-facing communication is accurate and timely.
• Make the calls: evaluate proposed solution paths, weigh mitigation against resolution, understand customer and infrastructure impact, and decide on the course of action; escalate to Engineering or leadership when needed.
• Hand incidents off cleanly to and from other regions, and contribute to improving our incident management runbooks, tooling, and process.

Collaborate across the company

• Serve as the regional point of contact between Support and Engineering, Product, Sales, and Customer Success.
• Collaborate with managers in other regions on people management, process, documentation, and product initiatives as we scale.
• Bring your technical understanding and product architecture knowledge to Cockroach Labs and keep learning about distributed databases.

The Expectations

In your first month, you'll become an integrated member of the team and get familiar with CockroachDB, our customers, our incident management process, and our company.

Within three months, you'll be comfortable with CockroachDB and our processes, tools, and utilities. You'll be managing the APAC Technical Support Engineers day to day, and you'll have commanded your first customer incidents in the region with support from the global leadership team.

After six months, you'll independently own incident management for APAC and be improving our incident process from the inside. You'll be growing the team and ensuring each member is happy, successful, and producing quality work that aligns with the needs of the company and their own interests.

You Have

• Proven experience in technical support or a similar customer-facing technical role, with a minimum of 3 years of people management experience.
• Hands-on experience leading incident response for a technical product: coordinating responders, communicating with stakeholders under pressure, and driving retrospectives.
• A passion for building relationships and being responsible for the welfare, professional development, and growth of the team you manage.
• Strong leadership and people management skills, including experience with performance management and building teams that function independently while supporting each other.
• Experience working on complex technical products, with exposure to distributed systems, databases, and SQL.
• A track record of partnering across departments (Engineering, Product, Documentation, Sales, Customer Success) to get cross-functional issues resolved.
• Excellent problem-solving and decision-making abilities, especially with incomplete information and time pressure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; you can summarize a complex, evolving situation for a technical or executive audience.
• Ability to adapt to a dynamic work environment and handle high-pressure situations effectively.
• Clear ownership of your team's AI adoption and capability, not just your own.
• A track record of setting clear expectations, modeling the behaviors yourself, and creating space for experimentation.
• An uncompromising authorship standard for your team: unreviewed AI-assisted work is not acceptable.

Nice to Have

• Experience with incident management tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, Rootly, Jira Service Management) and support platforms such as Zendesk.
• Experience running or supporting a follow-the-sun, multi-region support organization.
• Experience with CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, or other distributed SQL databases, and with Kubernetes or major cloud platforms.

The Team

Reporting to Nick Lamb - Sr. Director of Technical Support

You'll join the leadership of two closely linked teams. Technical Support is a global team of engineers spanning the US, EMEA, and India who own the customer relationship when something goes wrong in production: answering questions, reproducing issues, and working with Engineering to get customers unblocked, around the clock in a follow-the-sun model. Incident Management, takes command when an issue becomes an incident, coordinating responders across Support, Engineering, and account teams and driving each one through resolution and retrospective. Between the two groups we have spent decades supporting distributed and cloud databases, and we care about the same things you will: engineers who are set up to succeed, customers who get straight answers, and incidents that end in a clear retrospective and real follow-through. You'll lead the Technical Support team during the APAC business day and be the lead Incident Manager in the region, the person who makes sure nothing drops at the handoff between the two teams or between time zones.

Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at accessibility@cockroachlabs.com.

Cockroach Labs has a hybrid work model, with Roachers that are local to one of our offices coming in on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and working flexibly the rest of the week. While we’ve learned valuable lessons working remotely, nothing can replace the connection, creativity, and fun that occurs when Roachers get together and we are committed to fostering a workplace that encourages collaboration and allows us all to do our best work.

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
• Retirement Benefits
• Mental Wellbeing Benefits
• And more!