Cogent Security

Software Engineer - Developer Experience at Cogent Security (San Francisco, CA)

Cogent Security· San Francisco, CA·

Role details

Work type
Hybrid
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

ABOUT COGENT

Cogent is an Applied AI Lab building the next generation of AI agents for cybersecurity. AI has fundamentally changed how attacks happen, allowing malicious actors to operate at unprecedented speed and scale. Cogent's "AI Taskforce" assesses petabytes of enterprise data to remediate these issues before critical breaches occur.

To stay at the cutting edge, we blend frontier research with real-world execution. Alongside our core product work, Cogent Research serves as our applied AI lab, providing the research horsepower needed to make truly agentic security workflows a reality. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We're backed by Greylock & Bain Capital Ventures, and we've built a team with the best minds in applied AI. Our team is comprised of people from:

  • Top universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Waterloo
  • Unicorn, high-growth companies like Scale AI, Databricks, Stripe, Tesla, Coinbase
  • World class cybersecurity experts from Wiz, Abnormal AI, Zscaler
  • Preeminent research labs like Deepmind and SAIL

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a Developer Experience Engineer on our Core Platform team to own the software delivery lifecycle - the build, CI/CD, and provisioning systems that let both engineers and agents ship securely and fast. You'll build the systems that take code from idea to production, including the infrastructure that lets agents build, deploy, test, and verify autonomously.

This is a hands-on role for someone who has built developer and delivery infrastructure at an AI or high-growth startup and wants to define how autonomous agents move code to production.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Build an agent development experience that streamlines idea to production, letting agents build, deploy, test, and verify code autonomously
  • Build a self-hosted software builder, a secure GitHub Actions Runner alternative that meets our compliance requirements
  • Adopt and operate a solution to provision infrastructure securely

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • Deep experience with CI/CD and build systems: GitHub Actions, Harness, Spacelift
  • Strong infrastructure-as-code skills with Terraform
  • Comfort working in an agent-forward environment with Claude Code and Codex
  • 2-4 years at an AI startup, plus 2-4 years at a successful high-growth tech company

BONUS POINTS

  • Self-hosting experience across GitHub and ECR
  • Build tooling experience: Pants, uv, e2b, pico
  • Artifactory
  • Prior startup founder experience
  • A secondary spike in Application Security

FOR CALIFORNIA BASED APPLICANTS

The standard base salary range for this position is $100,000 - $300,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits.

We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse company. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

Why work at Cogent Security

  • Culture: Values include customer centricity, intentionality, ambition for excellence, extreme ownership, velocity, and intellectual honesty. cogent.com/company/careers
  • Remote/Hybrid: In-person in San Francisco and New York, plus remote options within the US. cogent.com/company/careers
  • Engineering Culture: Engineers and AI researchers sit together; the distance from idea to production is measured in days. Emphasis on shipping production software, not just research.
  • Notable Perks: 12-week AI Fellowship for graduate researchers and early-career ML engineers; team hails from top companies like Coinbase, Databricks, AWS, Zscaler, and HashiCorp. cogent.com/company/careers
  • Growth Opportunity: Rapidly scaling startup with significant funding, strong customer traction, and a mission-driven focus on one of cybersecurity’s hardest problems.

Application questions