Software Engineer - Applied AI

Cogent; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent is building the world’s first AI cyber taskforce and a scalable Gen AI platform. We seek AI/ML engineers who can design production-grade AI solutions for cybersecurity, partner with design customers, and mentor junior team members as we scale.

You will work on autonomous agent systems, data-driven workflows, and state-of-the-art ML techniques to deliver secure, reliable AI-enabled security tooling within Cogent’s ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Multiple years of experience building AI-driven systems in production.
• Expertise in ML/DL and applying AI models to real-world problems.
• Experience designing autonomous/agentic systems and integrating into apps.
• Ability to scale and optimize AI systems in production.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, NLP, CV, and large generative models.
• Proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams and iterate on models.

Responsibilities

• Architect and launch the world’s first AI Cyber Taskforce.
• Build and extend Cogent’s Gen AI Platform.
• Help create a robust engineering culture at Cogent.

Skills

AI-driven systems

Machine learning

Deep learning

Agentic systems

Autonomous agents

Performance optimization

Reinforcement learning

Natural language processing

Computer vision

Generative models

Collaboration

Iterative development

Tools

LLMs

Retrieval systems

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.

Since coming out of stealth, Cogent has experienced rapid growth. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We’re backed by Greylock 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

As we onboard our first design partners, Cogent is launching the world's first AI cyber taskforce, which is composed of AI agents capable of human-caliber reasoning for cybersecurity tasks. We are looking for talented, ambitious AI/ML Engineers who are excited to build in the Applied AI space.

What You’ll Do & Achieve

• Architect and launch the world’s first AI Cyber Taskforce

  • Work closely with our design customers to design and launch our flagship AI agents that are capable of automating tasks in vulnerability management

  • Understand business goals, product and technology strategies, and customer requirements and implement business-critical AI systems to achieve them

  • Identify appropriate datasets and data representations to support system development

  • Decompose existing enterprise security workflows into sub-tasks that can be modeled as an autonomous system

  • Experiment with the latest advancements in long-term reasoning and planning to design systems that allows Cogent to evolve the data flywheel of our AI products from initially highly supervised to eventually autonomous and managed by exception

• Build and extend Cogent’s Gen AI Platform

  • Implement reusable system components for ranking, retrieval and search systems powered by LLMs for agentic automation

  • Put in place frameworks to train, evaluate, and stress-test ML systems, and extend improvements on Cogent’s Gen AI platform

  • Stay on top of and when appropriate, propose incorporating cutting edge developments in ML and Gen AI into Cogent’s AI systems

• Help create a robust engineering culture at Cogent

  • Onboard, support and uplevel future team members

  • Mentor and grow future junior team members

  • Actively contribute to Engineering Excellence, Operational Excellence and Recruiting initiatives

What You’ll Bring

• Multiple years of relevant experience in developing and deploying AI-driven systems, with a proven track record of architecting practical, production-grade solutions that solve real-world problems

• Expertise in machine learning, deep learning, and AI models, with a deep understanding of how to apply these technologies to build scalable, performant systems in production environments

• Experience with designing and deploying agentic systems and autonomous agents, as well as integrating these AI components into larger applications or products

• Ability to address and navigate real-world scale and performance challenges, ensuring that AI models and systems are efficient, robust, and performant under production constraints

• Familiarity with cutting-edge AI technologies, including reinforcement learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and large-scale generative models

• Proven ability to work iteratively and collaborate with cross-functional teams to evolve AI models and systems that meet evolving product needs and user expectations

• Passion for staying at the forefront of AI advancements, continuously learning and applying emerging techniques to improve product performance and drive innovation

For California Based Applicants

The standard base salary range for this position is $100,000 - $300,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits.

We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse company. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.