Business Operations & Strategy

Cogent-Security; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent is seeking a Business Operations Associate to work directly with company leadership on the most important problems facing the business. This highly dynamic, high-ownership role offers rare exposure to how a category-defining company is built end to end, with opportunities across operational reviews, talent initiatives, and Cogent’s external presence.

The role will involve partnering with founders and leaders to drive strategic initiatives, standing up QA and partnerships, and translating

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in consulting, investment banking, product management, or early-stage startup / founder roles
• Highly comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments with minimal structure
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, paired with excellent judgment
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• Strong relationship-builder who works well across technical and non-technical teams
• High ownership mindset with a bias towards action

Responsibilities

• Partner with founders and company leaders to drive high-priority strategic and operational initiatives
• Drive the operational engine behind our research initiatives, including standing up strategic partnerships to create benchmarks and RL environments
• Stand up our QA function from the ground up
• Own product operations: translate customer requirements into buildable specs and manage the ticket pipeline between pre and post sales asks
• Step into new strategic priorities as they emerge, taking ownership and driving them to impact

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.

Since coming out of stealth, Cogent has experienced rapid growth. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We’re backed by Greylock 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

As a Business Operations Associate, you’ll operate as a true generalist working directly with company leadership on the most important problems facing the business at any given time.

This is a highly dynamic, high-ownership role. One quarter you might be focused on operational reviews, the next on talent initiatives or building Cogent’s external presence. The common thread is: you’ll work on whatever matters most to moving the company forward.

The role offers rare exposure to how a category-defining company is built end to end, making it a strong fit for someone excited by company-building and long-term leadership growth.

What You’ll Do

• Partner with founders and company leaders to drive high-priority strategic and operational initiatives




• Drive the operational engine behind our research initiatives, including standing up strategic partnerships to create benchmarks and RL environments




• Stand up our QA function from the ground up




• Own product operations: translate customer requirements into buildable specs and manage the ticket pipeline between pre and post sales asks




• Step into new strategic priorities as they emerge, taking ownership and driving them to impact

About You

• 2+ years of experience in consulting, investment banking, product management, or early-stage startup / founder roles




• Highly comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments with minimal structure




• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, paired with excellent judgment




• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills




• Strong relationship-builder who works well across technical and non-technical teams




• High ownership mindset with a bias towards action