---
title: 'Research Engineer, Safety & Alignment at Cognition'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-safety-alignment-cognition-san-francisco-876gejt14bry'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Research Engineer, Safety & Alignment 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/023cea7e-70db-4f79-8e82-c57564466622

## 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 writes and runs code, uses tools, takes actions in real customer systems, and operates for hours without a human in the loop. Safety here is not a research paper; it is whether an agent behaves correctly in production, millions of times a day. You will be a founding member of Cognition's safety team, reporting to the Head of Safety. You will build the evaluations and red-teaming that gate every release, develop alignment methods that shape how our models are trained, and work directly with the agent team on how Devin plans, acts, and asks for help. This is a hands-on research engineering role for someone who wants their safety work to run in the loop of a real agent, not sit in a benchmark.

## What You'll Accomplish

- Build agentic safety evals: Design and run evaluations for the failure modes that matter for autonomous agents: unsafe actions, prompt injection, data exfiltration, sandbox escape, reward hacking, and misuse. Make them fast enough to run on every model and product release.
- Red-team Devin: Attack the agent and its harness systematically. Find the failures before customers do and turn them into fixes and regression tests.
- Develop alignment methods: Work with post-training on reward modeling, preference data, constitutional approaches, and other techniques that make the model safer without making it worse at the job.
- Shape the agent harness: Partner with the agent team on permissions, oversight, and escalation: when Devin should act, when it should ask, and how it should explain itself.
- Publish and share: Contribute to Cognition's external safety work through papers, evals, and open methods where it makes sense.

Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated

- Safety or alignment research experience: Hands-on work on evaluations, red-teaming, alignment, or interpretability at a frontier AI lab or in published research. You have built things that changed how a model was trained or deployed.
- Agentic systems understanding: You know how agents fail in practice: tool misuse, specification gaming, long-horizon drift, adversarial inputs. You have measured it or have concrete ideas about how to.
- Strong engineering fundamentals: Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or JAX). You can build eval infrastructure, run experiments at scale, and read the training and inference code.
- Empirical rigor: You design clean experiments, report results honestly, and know the difference between a real improvement and noise.
- Comfort with adversarial thinking: You enjoy breaking systems and are good at it.
- Relevant industry experience: Prior experience at a frontier AI lab, applied AI company, or developer tools company.
- Advanced degree: PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline; or equivalent industry research experience.

## 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

- [Head of Safety](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-safety-cognition-san-francisco-0k7hanpzr76f) — 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