Federal Account Director

Cognition (Software Development Applications); Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognition is seeking a Federal Account Director to own the full revenue lifecycle for U.S. federal customers and partners, driving adoption and sustained Devin usage within mission-critical government environments.

You will source, close, and operationalize deals, then remain accountable for customer success, retention, and expansion across your portfolio while feeding customer signal back to product and engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Proven success selling technical software into U.S. federal customers or major system integrators/defense primes.
• Experience managing accounts through deployment, renewal, and expansion phases.
• Ability to navigate DoW/IC and regulated federal environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the full federal account lifecycle from targeting to expansion, deployment, adoption and renewal.
• Manage revenue and customer outcomes across your portfolio and drive consumption growth.
• Drive revenue with DoD, IC, federal civilian agencies, and primes, both direct and through OTAs and CSOs.
• Serve as the primary commercial owner, maintaining executive relationships across the life of the account.
• Coordinate with mission owners, technical leadership, contracting, security, legal, and executives.
• Develop capture strategies across primes, subcontracting, OTAs, CSOs, pilots, and direct awards.
• Translate mission and technical requirements into Devin use cases across software engineering, data, AI, and platform teams.
• Deliver credible demos and engage with customer engineering teams before and after deployment.
• Onboard and achieve production adoption, removing barriers to value realization.
• Develop account plans to increase Devin consumption and expand into new teams and use cases.
• Identify new federal and contractor use cases and provide feedback to product/engineering.
• Build federal GTM motion including pipeline generation, partner strategy, account management, expansion, and repeatable processes.

Skills

Federal sales

Technical software

Account management

Capture strategy

Long-term customer success

Job description

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents.

We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer.

Our team is extremely talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro.

Building Devin is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.

About the Role

As a Federal Account Director, you will own the full commercial relationship and revenue lifecycle across U.S. federal customers and partners, driving adoption and sustained consumption of Devin within mission critical government and national security environments. You will source, close, and operationalize deals, then remain accountable for customer success, adoption, retention, and expansion throughout the life of the account, while feeding direct customer signal back into Cognition’s product and engineering teams.

You will work cross functionally with product, engineering, and leadership to shape Devin for federal use cases, ensure customers realize value from their deployments, and accelerate Cognition’s federal market penetration.

This role requires experience selling highly technical software into complex federal organizations, comfort operating in regulated acquisition environments, and the persistence required to move programs from initial engagement to production deployment and sustained, expanding usage. Account Directors operate as the primary owner of their accounts across both pre sale and post sale engagement.

In this role, you will:

• Own the full federal account lifecycle from account targeting and capture strategy through award, onboarding, and expansion, deployment, adoption, consumption, renewal, and expansion

• Own revenue and customer outcomes across your portfolio, including both new customer commitments and growth in consumption within existing accounts

• Drive revenue across the Dept. of War (DoW), intelligence community (IC), federal civilian agencies, and federal contractors, including large primes (OEMs and system integrators)

• Serve as the primary commercial and strategic owner for customers, maintaining executive and operational relationships throughout the life of the account

• Navigate complex stakeholder sets including mission owners, technical leadership, contracting officers, security, legal, and executive sponsors

• Develop capture strategies across primes, subcontracting paths, OTAs, CSOs, pilots, and direct awards

• Translate mission and technical requirements into high-value Devin use cases across software engineering, data, AI, and platform teams

• Deliver technically credible demos and engage deeply with customer engineering teams before and after deployment

• Drive successful onboarding and production adoption, identifying and resolving barriers that limit customer usage or value realization

• Develop account plans that identify opportunities to increase Devin consumption, expand into new teams and use cases, and grow the long term value of each customer relationship

• Identify new federal and contractor use cases and provide structured feedback to product and engineering based on both prospective customer needs and observed production usage

• Build federal GTM motion including pipeline generation, partner strategy, account management, expansion strategy, and repeatable customer lifecycle process

Requirements

• Proven success selling technical software into U.S. federal customers and/or major system integrators/defense prime OEMs, with wins via primes or direct vehicles such as OTAs, CSOs, pilots, or programs of record

• Experience owning customer relationships beyond the initial sale, including deployment, adoption, renewal, expansion, or consumption growth

• Experience engaging DoW, IC, and or federal civilian agencies in classified or regulated environments

• Strong technical background as a software engineer, sales engineer, forward deployed engineer, or equivalent technical fluency

• Ability to quickly learn complex technical systems, mission constraints, and acquisition processes

• Ability to move fluidly between selling, account strategy, technical problem solving, and customer success depending on what an account requires

• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast changing startup environments with minimal structure

• Strong ownership mindset with bias toward execution and results

You may excel if you:

• Have founded or scaled an early stage company

• Have closed large, multi-stakeholder enterprise or federal software deals and subsequently grown those relationships

• Have experience moving pilots into production within federal environments and driving meaningful adoption and consumption after deployment

• Have managed strategic accounts where success was measured by both new revenue and expansion of existing customer usage

• Have a computer science or engineering background and moved into GTM to work closer to customers

• Thrive in high intensity, high accountability environments where you are expected to own the customer outcome rather than hand the account off after close

Equal Opportunity

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.