Software Engineer (AI Specialist)

Cogna; London; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogna is seeking a creative Software Engineer to develop scalable, reliable, and efficient AI-first software. As part of a dynamic team, you will work on cutting-edge technology to solve productivity challenges for customers. The role offers a chance to innovate in a fast-paced startup environment, with a focus on building high-quality software solutions.

Benefits

Competitive salary and share option plan

25 days annual leave plus public holidays

Excellent pension scheme matched to 7.5%

Private healthcare including family cover

Flexible hybrid working

Regular social events and offsites

Access to gym and fitness classes

Qualifications

• At least 3 years of relevant work experience.
• Proficient in Python, Docker, and PostgreSQL.
• Experience with LLM toolchains is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define, build, and maintain AI-first product features.
• Experiment with AI/LLM techniques to improve outputs.
• Collaborate closely in a small team to build software.

Skills

Python

Docker

PostgreSQL

LLMs

Clean Code

Job description

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At Cogna, we're working hard to solve the productivity crisis. Improving the productivity of everyday workers is absolutely necessary to solve the biggest problems of our time, such as climate change, affordable healthcare and social equality.

Unfortunately, the productivity crisis is not a single problem that can be tackled with a silver-bullet solution, it’s the accumulation of millions of highly specific, context-driven challenges across every facet of every organisation. Each of these problems requires a tailored solution, and we must provide those quickly and at scale.

Affordable, tailor made, productive software is Cogna’s mission.. We’re creating an AI-powered platform that understands the pain points in every customer's business , defines the requirements, and develops the software fully automatically. The result is high-quality, precision software at scale.

Since our launch in May 2023, we’ve already seen significant traction and customer revenue that outpaces most companies. We’re backed by top VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we’re growing our world-class team and are looking for people that want to be on the cutting edge of software engineering. Our team comes from diverse backgrounds and experiences, from worlds best universities like Cambridge and Imperial College London and biggest tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Palantir.

This is more than a job, it’s an opportunity to be part of something genuinely transformative. Are you up for the challenge?

Overview

We are looking for a creative Software Engineer with a passion for developing scalable, reliable, efficient, and beautiful AI-first software and have a strong sense of ingenuity. You will be part of an all-star early team, building the future of software.

We’ve been building products with AI at its core for enterprise customers since the early days of GPT-3.5 to the latest and greatest models, and have built internal tooling to efficiently and effectively work with LLMs. We understand that building reliable products using AI is much more than writing a good prompt. We put a lot of thought and effort into making outputs of LLMs reliable and verifiable in our product, whether that’s code or more unstructured outputs. We have frameworks for evaluation, verification, specialized code and test generation pipelines, agentic behavior, RAG, observability and orchestration tooling, and many more... all widely used across our product, neatly integrated, and informed by real customer and product needs. Each of these are constantly evolving to adapt to the state of the art, and being built by a world-class team who are always experimenting.

You’ll be helping to develop these, as well as using them to build the “brain” of our platform: building agents and end-to-end pipelines to understand the customer’s pain points, define requirements, and generate & verify software to address these in a reliable way. We’re truly building at the edge of what’s possible and we need creative minds who can move fast to push the boundaries.

What you’ll do

• Define, build, and maintain reliable AI-first product features, including internal frameworks and tooling for working with LLMs
• Experiment with various AI/LLM techniques, models, and approaches to increase the accuracy and reliability of our outputs.
• Build and improve evaluation systems and benchmarks.
• Design and build reusable application architectures and toolchains, working closely with the software synthesis team.
• Write and ship high-quality, efficient, and reliable code that is extendible, scalable, and observable. You know how to move fast without breaking things and you know how to keep the right balance between experimentation and shipping.
• Take ideas from experimentation to shipping. You intuitively know what a great product looks like.
• Build and help foster an engineering culture that encourages innovation and high-quality code standards, while shipping fast.
• Collaborate closely in a small highly motivated team to build world-class software.

What we’re looking for

• At least 3 years of relevant work experience.
• The drive to work at an early-stage startup. You thrive in a fast-paced, quickly changing, and independent environment.
• You’re highly proficient in modern typed Python, docker, and PostgreSQL. Experience in a compiled typed language like Go or Rust, or in modern frontend development is a plus.
• You’re proficient in modern Python ecosystems and toolchains and have worked with them in complex large codebases. You understand the intricacies of them.
• You’re a creative experimentalist at heart and have industry experience in an environment where this was necessary.
• You either have professional experience using LLMs or have enthusiastically experimented in your own time. Industry experience with LLM toolchains and ecosystems (e.g. libraries like Langchain, observability tooling, RAG systems, etc.) is a plus.
• You have a fundamental understanding of code analysis, compilers, domain-specific languages, or related topics, and are keen to learn in this area.
• You are passionate about clean and reusable interfaces, but can iterate fast on them.
• You can work closely with a product manager to turn customer requirements into reliable systems quickly, and iterate from there, while balancing long-term engineering maintenance effort. You’re great at communicating technical systems succinctly to a product-focused audience.
• Familiarity with e2e testing frameworks, large language models, CI/CD tooling, workflow orchestration systems such as Argo or Temporal, and/or experience with Kubernetes is a plus.

Special note about career breaks: We accept candidates with career breaks and CV gaps. Life happens, we get it. Please apply anyway!

What we offer

• Competitive salary and share option plan
• 25 days annual leave, plus public holidays
• Excellent pension scheme, matched to 7.5%
• Private healthcare, including family cover and pre-existing conditions
• Flexible hybrid working with 2 days per fortnight in our Farringdon office, but different schedules can be negotiated.
• Regular social events and offsites
• Access to a gym and fitness classes in our office building

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Information Technology

• Industries

  Technology, Information and Internet

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