People Operations

Cognition (Software Development Applications); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognition is an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents in San Francisco. We are growing fast and hiring an HR leader to own the engine behind People operations, including onboarding, benefits, compliance, and our immigration program end to end.

You will support global mobility across countries, coordinate with outside counsel on visas (H-1B, O-1, PERM, green cards), design scalable processes, and help leadership navigate complex People decisions in a lean, fast-moving company.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Support global mobility and international expansion, building People infrastructure for Cognition as it expands.
• Serve as a trusted immigration expert, managing visa sponsorship, renewals, status changes, travel considerations, and other immigration questions; coordinate with outside counsel for US immigration end to end.
• Drive process design and continuous improvement across the employee lifecycle, simplifying and automating People operations.
• Bring an operational lens to business decisions, surface risks and dependencies, and help leaders navigate complex People situations.
• Jump into high-priority People and business projects as Cognition grows and evolves.

Skills

Global mobility

Immigration management

HR generalist

Process design

Cross-border expansion

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.