Operations Generalist

Cogent-Security; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent is hiring an Operations Associate to manage day-to-day operations spanning people operations, workplace operations, events, and special projects. You will work across functions, gaining exposure to how a category-defining company is built.

You should thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, own your work end-to-end, and leverage AI tools to automate tasks rather than performing repetitive work manually.

Qualifications

• 2+ years in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Background in a cross-functional role (people operations, workplace ops, events, or office management).
• Self-starter who can work with minimal direction.

Responsibilities

• Own Workplace Operations across San Francisco and New York locations, including supplies, landlord relations, and events logistics.
• Own People Operations responsibilities from recruiting coordination to onboarding and ramp planning, including immigration coordination.
• Plan and execute events to build the Cogent brand with a recurring calendar.
• Collaborate with founders and Head of BizOps on strategic initiatives.

Skills

Startup experience

Cross-functional role

Self-starter

Operations management

Written communication

Attention to detail

Discretion handling sensitive info

AI tooling for automation

Education

Undergraduate degree

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. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We’re backed by Greylock & Bain Capital Ventures, 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

We're hiring an Operations Associate to own the day-to-day operations that keep Cogent running - ranging across people operations, workplace operations, events, and special projects. You'll work across the business rather than sitting inside one function. This 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

• Workplace Operations: Own office logistics across both locations in San Francisco and New York, from supplies and landlord relationships, to running company swag from concept to delivery, to planning off-sites.

• People Operations: Own recruiting coordination and onboarding end to end, from scheduling and offer logistics to designing how new hires ramp. You'll also handle legal and immigration coordination and run the Cogent Founder Academy.

• Events: Dream up events that build the Cogent brand and own them end to end - concept, logistics, & invites, while building a recurring events calendar and cadence for the company.

• Special Projects: Partner directly with the founders and the Head of Bizops to tackle other strategic initiatives that come up.

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of experience working in a fast-paced environment, ideally at a startup (open to less if you're high-slope and quick to pick things up)

• Background in an ambiguous, cross-functional role - people operations, workplace operations, office management, or events management

• A self-starter who can unblock themselves and drive work without heavy direction

• Good taste and a point of view on what makes an office, an offsite, or an onboarding experience actually good, not just checked off a list

• Comfortable owning work across very different domains without dropping details

• Energized by a fast-moving, high-intensity environment rather than drained by it

• Reaches for AI tools as a default way of working (e.g., building a script or an automation to solve a problem instead of doing it by hand every time)

• Strong written communication: clear, simple, and calibrated to the audience

• Experience handling sensitive employee information with accuracy and discretion

Bonus Points

• Strong undergraduate degree with consulting experience

• Experience having founded your own venture or built a function from 0-1