---
title: 'Federal Account Director at Cognition'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/federal-account-director-cognition-washington-vjv45yjzs73c'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Federal Account Director at Cognition

- **Company:** [Cognition](https://feeny.ai/companies/cognition)
- **Location:** Washington, DC
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-01-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cognition/b154cc8a-0f04-44b8-88d8-72901fc0582d/application

**Skills:** Federal Acquisition, Sales Engineering, Software Demos, Devin AI Software, OTA Sales, CSO Sales, Pilot Management, Government Procurement, Technical Requirements Analysis, Startup Environment Experience, Pilot Production Transition

> Own revenue growth across U.S. federal customers by sourcing, closing, and operationalizing deals for Devin AI software. The role involves navigating complex federal acquisition environments, engaging with mission-critical stakeholders, and collaborating with product and engineering teams to drive adoption in govern...

## Job description

WE ARE AN APPLIED AI LAB BUILDING END-TO-END SOFTWARE AGENTS.

We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer.

Our team is extremely talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro.

Building Devin is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Federal Account Director, you will own the full commercial relationship and revenue lifecycle across U.S. federal customers and partners, driving adoption and sustained consumption of Devin within mission critical government and national security environments. You will source, close, and operationalize deals, then remain accountable for customer success, adoption, retention, and expansion throughout the life of the account, while feeding direct customer signal back into Cognition’s product and engineering teams.

You will work cross functionally with product, engineering, and leadership to shape Devin for federal use cases, ensure customers realize value from their deployments, and accelerate Cognition’s federal market penetration.

This role requires experience selling highly technical software into complex federal organizations, comfort operating in regulated acquisition environments, and the persistence required to move programs from initial engagement to production deployment and sustained, expanding usage. Account Directors operate as the primary owner of their accounts across both pre sale and post sale engagement.

In this role, you will:

- Own the full federal account lifecycle from account targeting and capture strategy through award, onboarding, and expansion, deployment, adoption, consumption, renewal, and expansion
- Own revenue and customer outcomes across your portfolio, including both new customer commitments and growth in consumption within existing accounts
- Drive revenue across the Dept. of War (DoW), intelligence community (IC), federal civilian agencies, and federal contractors, including large primes (OEMs and system integrators)
- Serve as the primary commercial and strategic owner for customers, maintaining executive and operational relationships throughout the life of the account
- Navigate complex stakeholder sets including mission owners, technical leadership, contracting officers, security, legal, and executive sponsors
- Develop capture strategies across primes, subcontracting paths, OTAs, CSOs, pilots, and direct awards
- Translate mission and technical requirements into high-value Devin use cases across software engineering, data, AI, and platform teams
- Deliver technically credible demos and engage deeply with customer engineering teams before and after deployment
- Drive successful onboarding and production adoption, identifying and resolving barriers that limit customer usage or value realization
- Develop account plans that identify opportunities to increase Devin consumption, expand into new teams and use cases, and grow the long term value of each customer relationship
- Identify new federal and contractor use cases and provide structured feedback to product and engineering based on both prospective customer needs and observed production usage
- Build federal GTM motion including pipeline generation, partner strategy, account management, expansion strategy, and repeatable customer lifecycle process

## Requirements

- Proven success selling technical software into U.S. federal customers and/or major system integrators/defense prime OEMs, with wins via primes or direct vehicles such as OTAs, CSOs, pilots, or programs of record
- Experience owning customer relationships beyond the initial sale, including deployment, adoption, renewal, expansion, or consumption growth
- Experience engaging DoW, IC, and or federal civilian agencies in classified or regulated environments
- Strong technical background as a software engineer, sales engineer, forward deployed engineer, or equivalent technical fluency
- Ability to quickly learn complex technical systems, mission constraints, and acquisition processes
- Ability to move fluidly between selling, account strategy, technical problem solving, and customer success depending on what an account requires
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast changing startup environments with minimal structure
- Strong ownership mindset with bias toward execution and results

You may excel if you:

- Have founded or scaled an early stage company
- Have closed large, multi-stakeholder enterprise or federal software deals and subsequently grown those relationships
- Have experience moving pilots into production within federal environments and driving meaningful adoption and consumption after deployment
- Have managed strategic accounts where success was measured by both new revenue and expansion of existing customer usage
- Have a computer science or engineering background and moved into GTM to work closer to customers
- Thrive in high intensity, high accountability environments where you are expected to own the customer outcome rather than hand the account off after close

## EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.

## About Cognition

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cognition is an applied AI lab that operates Devin, the first autonomous AI software engineer capable of planning, writing, testing, and shipping production code.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D – latest funding round closed ~June 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (550 Third Street)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Not publicly disclosed in available sources; the founding team includes multiple IOI gold medalists and builders from Google DeepMind, Scale AI, Cursor, and Waymo.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Software Engineering
- **Target customers**: B2B, primarily large enterprises and government institutions (“some of the largest and most complex institutions in the world”)
- **Mission**: “To expand human capacity — not by replacing meaningful work but by working alongside people as an exponential collaborator, helping them think deeper and move faster.”

## Products & Services
- **[Devin](https://cognition.ai/)**: An autonomous AI software engineer that plans, writes, tests, and ships production code. It integrates with existing codebases and toolchains. Available as a cloud platform and via Devin Desktop. Deployed at major enterprises and government agencies.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $1.596B (implied by latest Series D round, ~June 2026) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cognition-ai)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $1.596B (Series D) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cognition-ai) *(Note: The company’s own website previously stated “over $400M” raised; CB Insights reports a higher total as of mid-2026.)*
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Bain Capital Ventures, Avenir, Elad Gil, and 42+ others [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cognition-ai)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Rapid global expansion with offices in San Francisco, New York, Austin, Washington D.C., London, Singapore, Tokyo, and more.
  - Launched “Cognition for Government” (Feb 2026) and an “AI Productivity Guarantee” (June 2026).
  - Named a Highflier in the AI 100 (2024) by CB Insights.
  - Active hiring across Sales, Customer Engineering, R&D, Marketing, and GTM roles in multiple regions.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover in autonomous AI software engineering** – Devin is widely recognized as the first AI agent that can independently complete end-to-end software tasks.
- **Elite founding team** – 10 IOI gold medals; alumni from DeepMind, Scale AI, Cursor, Waymo, Nuro, etc. Of the initial 35 team members, 21 had previously founded a company.
- **Massive capital backing** – Over $1.5B raised enables aggressive R&D and go-to-market expansion.
- **Enterprise traction** – Deployed at “some of the largest and most complex institutions in the world,” including government agencies.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening autonomous reasoning** – Continuously improving Devin’s ability to handle complex, multi-step engineering tasks (e.g., FrontierCode benchmark).
- **Global scale** – Building out sales and deployment teams in APAC, Europe, LATAM, and the Middle East.
- **Government & regulated sectors** – Dedicated federal team and FedRAMP-oriented offerings (e.g., “Cognition for Government”).
- **Product ecosystem** – Expanding from cloud to desktop and offering productivity guarantees to reduce customer risk.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Talent-dense,” interdisciplinary, low-ego, and urgency-driven. The team works on “the hardest problems in AI” and values shipping real impact.
- **Work model**: Hybrid/office-first with major hubs in San Francisco, New York, Austin, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and others. Many roles list specific locations, suggesting in-office presence is expected.
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision insurance; unlimited PTO; meals in primary offices; wellness stipend; commuter benefits; 401(k); HSA/FSA; fertility and family building support.
- **Engineering culture**: Strong emphasis on applied AI, customer proximity (“we work alongside our customers”), and building infrastructure that redefines software engineering.

## Sources
1. [cognition.ai](https://cognition.ai/) – Company homepage and product overview
2. [cognition.ai/careers](https://cognition.ai/careers) – Careers page with benefits and open roles
3. [cognition.ai/about](https://cognition.ai/about) – About page with team background and principles
4. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/cognition-ai) – Funding, valuation, and competitor data

## Other roles at Cognition

- [Country Leader - South Korea](https://feeny.ai/job/country-leader-south-korea-cognition-south-korea-aswm754d5273) — South Korea
- [Legal Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/legal-operations-cognition-san-francisco-wqy05tza5xf6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of EMEA Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-emea-marketing-cognition-london-mwgg79ty56km) — London, United Kingdom
- [Facility Security Officer](https://feeny.ai/job/facility-security-officer-cognition-washington-8d3ksmnmns4y) — Washington, DC
- [Head of LATAM Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-latam-marketing-cognition-sao-paolo-56px7yraf2rm) — Sao Paolo, Brazil
- [Event Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/event-marketer-cognition-san-francisco-h9fse9vdqf7y) — San Francisco, CA / Austin, TX / New York, NY
- [Talent Operations Coordinator, R&D](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-operations-coordinator-r-d-cognition-san-francisco-f20171kjeahn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding GTM Recruiter - Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-gtm-recruiter-japan-cognition-tokyo-pm6kdfr9c8nh) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Founding Recruiting Operations Coordinator - APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiting-operations-coordinator-apj-cognition-singapore-5chzfr7ygn49) — Singapore
- [People Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-lead-cognition-san-francisco-9pavqqb3fsh2) — San Francisco, CA