---
title: 'Staff AI Engineer at Cobalt'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-ai-engineer-cobalt-remote-v4kva1gbhr3m'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-04'
---

# Staff AI Engineer at Cobalt

- **Company:** Cobalt
- **Location:** Remote
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cobaltio/jobs/8912545002

## Job description

Description

Cobalt runs AI agents in production that test real customer applications. We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer who has built and operated production agent systems and can help us make them more reliable, secure and cost-efficient.

You’ll set the technical direction for how we design, evaluate, ship and operate agents, and stay hands-on building the foundations our teams use. You’ll work across engineering, product, research and security, mentoring engineers and helping teams turn promising prototypes into dependable production systems.

Your primary focus will be our agent platform and production practices. You’ll also help engineering teams improve how they build software with AI coding agents.

## What You’ll Do

- Set technical direction for agent systems across teams, including orchestration, tool use, context and memory management, human oversight and failure recovery.
- Design, build and operate shared foundations: evaluation frameworks, agent observability and tracing, execution controls, and model access with routing and failover where needed.
- Establish evaluation practices that measure task completion, accuracy, false positives, security and cost per successful task. Work with domain experts to build representative test cases and turn production failures into regression tests.
- Make agent workflows resilient to tool failures, timeouts, rate limits and partial execution, with clear limits on retries, runtime and spend.
- Work with security and platform teams to build in scoped permissions, customer data isolation, audit trails and safe execution of tools and code.
- Establish practical engineering standards: evals in CI, prompt and model versioning, regression testing for non-deterministic systems, cost and latency budgets, and staged rollouts with rollback paths.
- Lead model selection and cost optimization. Benchmark models against real workloads and make informed trade-offs between quality, latency and cost.
- Partner with teams on production readiness, incident investigation and improvements to agent reliability.
- Help teams use AI coding agents effectively across planning, implementation, review and testing. Measure the impact on delivery speed and software quality.
- Mentor engineers and technical leads through design reviews, pairing, internal talks and written guidance. Help teams adopt shared capabilities and improve them based on feedback.
- Work with product, research and security leaders to turn business priorities into a technical roadmap with clear outcomes.

You Must Have

- Significant software engineering experience, typically 8–10+ years, with a track record of technical leadership across teams.
- Hands-on experience building and operating LLM-based agents in production, with a clear understanding of their scale, constraints and business outcomes.
- A track record of improving agent reliability: building evaluations, investigating non-deterministic failures and improving success rates against measurable goals.
- Strong knowledge of agent architectures, including tool use, orchestration, planning, context and memory management, and the judgment to know when simpler workflows are sufficient.
- Experience running LLM workloads through managed cloud model platforms or direct provider APIs, including rate limits, failure handling and cost tracking.
- Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals, including APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency and fault tolerance.
- Experience with production observability, incident investigation and safe rollout of system changes.
- An understanding of security risks in agent systems, including prompt injection, unsafe tool execution and exposure of sensitive data.
- Evidence of impact beyond your own code: shared platforms other teams adopted, standards that improved outcomes or engineers you helped grow.

Tools and Practices You’ve Likely Used

We care more about your depth of experience and engineering judgment than experience with any specific tool.

- Agent orchestration: Framework-based or custom orchestration, tool calling and structured outputs.
- Tool integration: Model Context Protocol (MCP), APIs and permission-controlled tool execution.
- Evaluations: Automated evaluation harnesses, domain-specific test datasets and regression testing in CI.
- Observability: Distributed tracing, structured logs and metrics for multi-step agent workflows.
- Model access: Managed cloud model platforms, direct provider APIs and multi-provider gateways.

## Nice To Have

- Experience with GCP, Go or Kubernetes.
- Experience building sandboxed environments for agents that execute untrusted code or interact with external systems.
- Offensive security, application security or security tooling experience.
- Experience introducing AI coding tools across engineering teams and measuring their impact.
- Public writing, talks or open-source contributions related to agent engineering.

## Why You Should Join Us

- Grow in a passionate, rapidly expanding industry operating at the forefront of the Pentesting industry
- Work directly with experienced senior leaders with ongoing mentorship opportunities
- Earn competitive compensation and an attractive equity plan
- Save for the future with a 401(k) program (US) or pension (EU)
- Benefit from medical, dental, vision and life insurance (US) or statutory healthcare (EU)
- Leverage stipends for:
- Wellness
- Work-from-home equipment & wifi
- Learning & development
- Make the most of our flexible, generous paid time off and paid parental leave

Pay Range Disclosure

Cobalt is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range for this role is ($275,000 - $300,000) + equity + benefits. A candidate’s salary is determined by various factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, and certifications.  The salary range may differ in other states and may be impacted by proximity to major metropolitan cities.

Cobalt (the "Company") is an equal opportunity employer, and we want the best available persons for every job. The Company makes employment decisions only based on merit. It is the Company's policy to prohibit discrimination in any employment opportunity (including but not limited to recruitment, employment, promotion, salary increases, benefits, termination and all other terms and conditions of employment) based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, pregnancy, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical/mental disability, medical condition, marital/domestic partner status, military and veteran status, height, weight or any other such characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. The Company is committed to complying with all applicable laws and providing equal employment opportunities. This commitment applies to all persons involved in the operations of the Company regardless of where the employee is located and prohibits unlawful discrimination by any employee of the Company.

Cobalt is an E-Verify employer. E-Verify is an Internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the Social Security Administration (SSA). It allows participating employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of their newly hired employees in the United States.

## About Cobalt

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cobalt provides a human-led, AI-powered Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform that enables organizations to conduct continuous offensive security testing across their attack surface.
- **Entity Type**: Private (venture-backed startup)
- **Headquarters**: United States (remote-first, with Scandinavian roots and presence in US, UK, and Germany)
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Martin Rannje and Christian Hansen (co-founders, per leadership page) [cobalt.io/team]

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity – specifically Penetration Testing as a Service (PtaaS) and offensive security.
- **Target customers**: B2B, ranging from SMB to enterprise, with a focus on development, security, and operations teams.
- **Mission**: To help organizations “operate fearlessly and innovate securely” by making security testing faster, simpler, and more transparent. [cobalt.io/about]

## Products & Services
- **Cobalt Platform (PTaaS)**: SaaS platform that pairs with a vetted community of pentesters to deliver on-demand penetration tests, starting in as little as 24 hours. Includes automated reconnaissance, AI-powered exploit intelligence, and integrations with ITSM, DevOps, and collaboration tools.
- **Offensive Security Services**: Penetration testing (web, mobile, network, cloud), Digital Risk Assessment (identifying publicly exposed information), and Secure Code Review.
- **Cobalt Core**: An exclusive community of over 400 highly vetted pentesters (acceptance rate ~5%) who conduct thousands of tests annually. Creates a talent marketplace for on-demand security expertise.

All offerings emphasize human expertise amplified by AI and a decade of proprietary exploit intelligence. [cobalt.io]

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available.
- **Key Metric**: Over 1,500 customers served; platform delivers 2.6x faster time to report and gets customers to remediation 50% faster than traditional approaches.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in provided sources.
- **Growth Signals**: Fast-growing remote-first cybersecurity start-up; expanding globally with employees from 45+ nationalities; recognized as an award-winning “best workplace”; continuous product innovation in AI and automation. [cobalt.io/life][cobalt.io/about]

## Competitive Advantages
- **Human-Led, AI-Powered Pentesting**: Combines creative human testing (focusing on business logic abuse) with proprietary exploit intelligence AI to automate recon and isolate high-risk vulnerabilities faster.
- **Speed & Scale**: Start a pentest in 24 hours; 2.6x faster report turnaround; 50% faster remediation cycle.
- **Exclusive Talent Pool**: The Cobalt Core accepts only 5% of applicants, ensuring access to top-tier, vetted security experts.
- **Unified Platform**: Single pane of glass for managing findings, integrations with dev workflows, and continuous testing across the attack surface.

## Strategic Focus
- **Continuous Offensive Security**: Moving away from point-in-time testing to ongoing, proactive risk management.
- **AI Integration**: Leveraging over a decade of exploit data to continuously refine testing logic and improve automation.
- **Scaling the Community**: Expanding the Cobalt Core and platform to address global shortage of skilled security resources.
- **Customer Agility**: Empowering organizations to do more with less by integrating security testing into development cycles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: Emphasizes “Innovate Relentlessly,” “Lead with Grit,” “Quality at Speed and Scale,” and “One Cobalt.” Fully remote, remote-first with flexible PTO.
- **Perks**: Competitive compensation + equity, medical/dental/life insurance (US), 401k matching, paid parental leave, monthly stipends for wellness, WFH office setup, WiFi, and learning & development.
- **Diversity**: 45+ nationalities; equal opportunity employer that values inclusion and diverse perspectives.
- **Team**: Work directly with experienced senior leaders in a rapidly growing PtaaS market; opportunity to “make your mark.” [cobalt.io/life][job-boards.greenhouse.io/cobaltio]

## Sources
1. [Cobalt Homepage](https://www.cobalt.io)
2. [Careers at Cobalt (Greenhouse)](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cobaltio)
3. [About Cobalt](https://www.cobalt.io/about)
4. [Life at Cobalt](https://www.cobalt.io/life)
5. [Leadership Team](https://www.cobalt.io/team)

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