Director of Communications

Cogent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent is building a world-class marketing team, seeking a seasoned communications leader to own how the company shows up in press, podcasts, and industry events. You will drive the narrative around groundbreaking AI security research, CFO-level talks, and high-velocity coverage as the company scales.

You'll lead the agency, prep executives, and shape our external voice across media, creators, and partnerships, aiming to attract top talent and strategic customers.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years in communications or PR for B2B tech, cybersecurity preferred.
• Led communications for funding rounds, acquisitions, and major partnerships.
• Proven record of coverage in security trades and business press.
• Built a hands-on comms program with limited budget at a growth-stage startup.
• Sharp news judgment and ability to coach executives for hard interviews.
• Fluent with AI tools for monitoring, research, and drafting.

Responsibilities

• Own earned media strategy, calendars, and coverage plans for launches and milestones.
• Run the PR agency, set priorities, and ensure high-quality external messaging.
• Translate Cogent's work for security practitioners and business/AI press.
• Manage rapid response and live-cision when breaches or AI stories emerge.
• Build presence with newsletters, podcasts, creators, and trusted voices.
• Shape executive visibility through podcasts, conferences, and press interviews.
• Partner with recruiting on talent narrative and researcher/engineer positioning.

Skills

Media relations

Strategic comms

Executive counsel

Crisis comms

Storytelling

AI in comms

Education

Bachelor's in Communications/PR

Job description

About Cogent Security

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.

About Cogent Security

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 and 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 ML research labs like Deepmind and SAIL

About The Role

Cogent is building a world-class marketing team, and we're looking for smart, fast, exceptional people who are committed to our mission and bring a spark of creativity that sets us apart from traditional B2B marketing. As the founding communications leader, you'll own how Cogent shows up beyond our own channels: in the press, on podcasts and stages, with the creators and newsletters practitioners follow, and in the moments that define a company's reputation. Cogent has unusual raw material for a company this size: original research, Fortune 500 customers, and an engineering team drawn from the frontier AI labs. Your job is to turn that substance into steady coverage, a founder the market recognizes, and a reputation that helps us sell and hire. The AI security news cycle moves in hours, so this is a hands-on seat: you'll set the angles, run the agency, prep executives, and move fast when a story breaks.

What You'll Do

Media & Narrative

• Own Cogent's earned media strategy: the angles, the story calendar, and the coverage plan for launches, research, and company milestones.
• Run the PR agency: set its priorities, sharpen the pitches, and hold the bar on everything that goes out under Cogent's name.
• Translate Cogent's work for two audiences at once: security practitioners who will test every claim, and business and AI press who need the stakes in one sentence.
• Run rapid response. Watch the conversation across press, X, LinkedIn, and security communities, and when a breach, disclosure, or AI-security story breaks, get Cogent's take into the story while it's live. Content ships the POV piece; you get it cited.

Beyond the Press

• Build Cogent's presence where security buyers and AI builders now pay attention: newsletters, podcasts, creators, and the handful of voices each community trusts.
• Run creator and influencer partnerships that put Cogent's research and point of view in front of audiences we don't own. Content runs our channels; you get us into everyone else's.
• Shape how the AI research community sees Cogent, so the engineers and researchers we want to hire already know the story. Partner with recruiting on the talent narrative.

Executive Visibility

• Build the CEO's external presence: podcasts, conference stages, and press interviews that tie a founder to a category.
• Build a spokesperson bench beyond the CEO, starting with the CTO and Cogent Research, and media-train each of them.
• Book and prep every moment: secure the slot, write the briefing doc, and sharpen the message for the room.

Moments & Milestones

• Own announcement strategy: funding, marquee customers, partnerships, research drops, and the awards worth winning. Sequence them so each builds on the last.
• Partner with Product Marketing on launches: they own the product story and positioning, you own the coverage plan.
• Write the playbook for hard moments before they arrive: a vulnerability in our own product, a customer breach, a competitor's attack. Security companies get tested on this, usually on short notice.

AI-Native Execution

• Build the comms workflow on AI: media monitoring, briefing docs, first drafts, and coverage analysis, so a small function covers what used to take a team.
• Keep a living source of truth for approved claims, proof points, spokesperson briefs, and coverage history, so every announcement starts from what's already verified.
• Measure what the work moves: share of voice against the companies we compete with, coverage in the outlets buyers read, and executive audience growth.

What We're Looking For

Must-Have

• 8-10+ years in communications or PR for B2B tech, with cybersecurity strongly preferred. In-house, or a mix of in-house and agency.
• Led communications for funding rounds, acquisitions, and major partnerships for a growth-stage startup.
• A record of coverage you drove: launches, funding, and research turned into stories in the security trades and the business press.
• You've built a comms program at a small company: wrote the materials yourself, ran the agency, and got real results without a big team or budget.
• Sharp news judgment. You know what's a story, what isn't, and how to make one out of real substance without overreaching.
• Trusted counsel to executives. You've prepped CEOs for hard interviews and talked them out of the wrong ones.
• Strong writing across the communications surface: pitches, briefing docs, talking points, announcements.
• Fluent with AI in the actual work. You can walk through how you use it for monitoring, research, and drafting, where it broke, and what you changed.

Nice-to-Have

• Crisis or incident communications experience, ideally in security.
• Experience turning original research into earned coverage.
• Built creator, podcast, or influencer programs, or grew an executive's audience on X or LinkedIn.
• Familiarity with vulnerability management, exposure management, or AppSec/CloudSec adjacencies.

Why Cogent

Cogent is redefining how AI can proactively defend organizations against evolving threats. Our mission is to empower security teams with cutting-edge AI agents and clear, actionable insights. You'll join a world-class GTM team where your work directly impacts the safety of some of the world's most sophisticated organizations.