---
title: 'Head of Safety at Cognition'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-safety-cognition-san-francisco-0k7hanpzr76f'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Head of Safety at Cognition

- **Company:** [Cognition](https://feeny.ai/companies/cognition)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cognition/43f38460-632b-4b0a-8b14-888d117b2e07

## 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.

## Role Mission

Devin is one of the most capable autonomous agents in production. It writes and runs code, uses tools, takes actions in real customer systems, and operates for hours without a human in the loop. That makes it one of the most important places in the industry to get safety right, and one of the few where safety work ships to millions of developers rather than staying in a paper. You will build Cognition's safety function from the ground up: the research agenda, the evaluation and red-teaming program, the deployment policies, and the team. You will work directly with the researchers training our models and the engineers building the agent harness. This is a hands-on role for someone who has done serious safety or alignment work at a frontier lab and wants to apply it where agents actually operate.

## What You'll Accomplish

- Own safety end to end: Set the safety strategy for Devin and the models behind it, and own the outcomes.
- Build the evaluation program: Design evals and red-teaming for agentic risk: unsafe actions, prompt injection, data exfiltration, sandbox escape, reward hacking, and misuse. Make them part of every model and product release.
- Shape training and the agent harness: Partner with pre-training, post-training, and agent teams so safety is built into how models are trained and how Devin plans, acts, and asks for help.
- Set deployment policy: Define what Devin is and is not allowed to do, how permissions and oversight work, and how we handle the gray areas, in a way that holds up with enterprise customers.
- Build the team and the external voice: Hire and lead safety researchers and engineers. Represent Cognition's safety work with customers, policymakers, and the broader research community.

Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated

- Frontier lab safety or alignment experience: Hands-on work on safety, alignment, evaluations, or red-teaming at a frontier AI lab. You have shipped safety work that affected real models or products.
- Agentic systems depth: You understand how agents fail in practice: tool misuse, specification gaming, long-horizon drift, adversarial inputs. You have ideas about how to measure and mitigate it.
- Research credibility: A track record of published or widely used safety research, evals, or methods. An advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field is a plus.
- Technical fluency: Comfortable in Python and in the training and inference stack. You can read the code, run the evals, and argue with researchers on the details.
- Builder, not reviewer: You have started or scaled a safety function and prefer shipping mitigations to writing memos about them.
- Judgment under uncertainty: You can make clear calls on deployment risk with incomplete information and explain them to engineers, executives, and customers.

## 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

- [Research Engineer, Safety & Alignment](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-safety-alignment-cognition-san-francisco-876gejt14bry) — San Francisco, CA
- [Partner Director - US](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-director-us-cognition-san-francisco-g0s2zqh4b27z) — San Francisco, CA / Austin, TX / New York, NY
- [Partner Director - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-director-emea-cognition-london-6m6nta5v740s) — London, United Kingdom
- [SEO & AEO](https://feeny.ai/job/seo-aeo-cognition-san-francisco-x9r5aqarmte7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Integrated Marketing & Campaigns](https://feeny.ai/job/integrated-marketing-campaigns-cognition-san-francisco-hbpw2rqbv6t3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Paid & Digital](https://feeny.ai/job/paid-digital-cognition-san-francisco-ceqb1e8z589b) — San Francisco, CA
- [ABM/Enterprise Demand](https://feeny.ai/job/abm-enterprise-demand-cognition-san-francisco-htxb647p3pah) — San Francisco, CA
- [GTM Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-systems-engineer-cognition-san-francisco-0h8ca0fy4jc1) — San Francisco, CA
- [Onboarding Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/onboarding-coordinator-cognition-san-francisco-5z91pff0428w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Commercial Partner Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-partner-manager-cognition-san-francisco-xvqn4amar8cy) — San Francisco, CA / Austin, TX / New York, NY