Founding IT Engineer — Build IT from the Ground Up

Cogent-Security; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent-Security is hiring a Founding IT Engineer to build and own the IT function from the ground up. You will stand up systems, automation, and processes to keep teams productive and secure as we scale across San Francisco, New York, and remote work.

The role is in-person in San Francisco, 4 days a week, with responsibilities spanning endpoints, identity, vendor management, and internal tooling. You will write Python scripts and automate with n8n/Zapier while maintaining strong security

Qualifications

• Experience founding or building an IT function from zero at a fast-moving company.
• Security-first mindset from working in high-security environments.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python or similar.
• AI-native in practice using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex daily.
• Project management instincts enabling work beyond a single person.
• Hands-on, available IC role building, supporting, and responding.

Responsibilities

• Manage and secure endpoints across our environments.
• Own corporate identity and access (SSO, MFA, RBAC, provisioning).
• Run vendor management across SaaS stack (Google Workspace, Slack, Microsoft 365).
• Manage physical IT infrastructure across SF/NYC offices.
• Handle end-user support and on-call issue response.
• Build automation to scale and eliminate repetitive work (Python, n8n, Zapier).
• Define guardrails for AI tool usage and create internal docs and tooling.

Skills

Founding IT experience

Security-first mindset

Scripting & automation

AI-native workflows

Project management

Hands-on IC

Tools

Python

n8n

Zapier

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Cogent-Security is hiring a Founding IT Engineer to build and own the IT function from the ground up. You will stand up systems, automation, and processes to keep teams productive and secure as we scale across San Francisco, New York, and remote work.

The role is in-person in San Francisco, 4 days a week, with responsibilities spanning endpoints, identity, vendor management, and internal tooling. You will write Python scripts and automate with n8n/Zapier while maintaining strong security