People Operations

Cognition; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognition, an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents, is hiring a People Operations lead to own onboarding, benefits, compliance, compensation, and the immigration program end to end. You’ll shape the People infrastructure as Cognition expands globally, partnering with outside counsel and internal leaders.

You’ll optimize the employee lifecycle, support international mobility, design scalable processes, and help executives navigate complex People situations with sound judgment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in people operations or HR at a fast-growing startup or tech company.
• Generalist foundation across onboarding, benefits, compliance, employee relations, and policy.
• Experience managing US immigration cases (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards) with outside counsel.

Responsibilities

• Support global mobility and international expansion.
• Serve as trusted immigration point of contact; manage US immigration end to end with outside counsel.
• Drive process design and continuous improvement across the employee lifecycle.
• Bring an operational lens to business decisions and navigate People-related risks.
• Jump into high-priority People and business projects as needed.

Skills

People operations

HR generalist

US immigration experience

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.

About the Role

We're growing fast and bringing in world‑class talent from around the globe, and we're doing it differently than most. That kind of momentum doesn't run itself. We're hiring someone to build the engine behind it: the HR processes, playbooks, and systems that can scale as fast as we do. This is a rare chance to own real scope early. You'll help build and run our core HR functions from the ground up, including onboarding, benefits, compensation, compliance, and employee relations. You'll also own our immigration program end to end. Along the way you'll solve hard problems, work cases that actually matter to people's lives, and watch the things you build become how the company runs.

In this role you will:

• Support global mobility and international expansion, helping evaluate and operationalize employee moves across countries and building the People infrastructure required as Cognition enters new markets.
• Serve as a trusted point of contact for employees navigating immigration, including visa sponsorship, renewals, status changes, travel considerations, and other immigration-related questions; manage US immigration end to end (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards) in close coordination with outside counsel.
• Drive process design and continuous improvement across the employee lifecycle, identifying opportunities to simplify, automate, and improve how the People team operates.
• Bring an operational lens to business decisions, surfacing risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early and helping leaders navigate complex People situations with strong judgment.
• Jump into high-priority People and business projects as needed. We are a lean team operating in a rapidly evolving company, so the scope of this role will continue to expand alongside Cognition.

Requirements for this role:

• 3+ years in people operations or HR at a fast-growing startup or tech company
• Solid generalist foundation across core HR: onboarding, benefits administration, compliance, employee relations, and policy
• Practical experience managing US immigration cases (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards), including direct coordination with outside counsel

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.