Software Engineer - Backend

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

Job summary

Cogent, an Applied AI Lab, is building backend services and integrations powering autonomous AI workers for cybersecurity. We’re seeking talented backend senior and staff engineers to help shape scalable infrastructure and reliable systems.

You will design subsystems, lay the foundations for growth, and help cultivate an engineering culture through mentoring and participation in scaling processes. Strong expertise in Python/Go, distributed systems, and cloud-native tech is required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on backend engineering and technical leadership.
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and scalable architectures.
• Proficiency in Python or Go with understanding of concurrency and performance.
• Experience with API design and integration with data platforms.
• Strong knowledge of containers and multi-cloud deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement key backend, integration platform subsystems.
• Adapt and evolve systems to implement partner requirements and non-functional needs.
• Lay infrastructure foundations for growth and scalability.
• Help create a robust engineering culture and participate in interviewing and scaling efforts.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Microservices

Python

Go

API design (REST/gRPC)

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

REST/gRPC

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 work with our first design partners, Cogent is building a suite of backend services and integrations that will power our autonomous AI workers. We are looking for talented, ambitious Backend Senior and Staff Engineers who are excited to build in the Applied AI space.

What You’ll Do & Achieve

• Design and implement key backend, integration platform subsystems
  
  
  

  • Understand business goals, product and technology strategies and customer requirements and implement supporting backend and integration platform subsystems to achieve them

  
  

  • Adapt and evolve systems and plans to implement newly identified design partner and customer requirements

  
  

  • Adapt and evolve systems to implement non-functional requirements (compliance, security, enterprise integration etc.)

  
  
  
  


• Laying down infrastructure foundations for growth and scalability
  
  
  

  • Prepare Cogent for future headcount, customer, and data growth by working with a team to design and build an infrastructure that will scale and that achieves requirements in the areas of product capabilities, non-functional needs (reliability, security, disaster recovery, etc.).

  
  
  
  


• Help create a robust engineering culture at Cogent
  
  
  

  • Onboard, support and uplevel future team members

  
  

  • Participate in, provide feedback on, and iterate interview process as we scale the team up

  
  

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

  
  
  
  

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer and technical leader, overseeing and contributing to multiple backend systems and infrastructure projects




• Expertise in architecting, developing, and scaling backend systems, including both stateless and stateful architectures, to support high-performance, enterprise-level applications




• Proven experience with distributed systems, microservices, and serverless architectures, ensuring robustness, scalability, and fault tolerance




• Strong knowledge of backend programming languages such as Python, Go or similar, with a deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization




• Experience with API design and implementation (RESTful and/or gRPC), integrating with frontend systems, data platforms, and third-party services




• Solid experience with containerization, orchestration, and deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines in multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)

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.