Software Engineer - Developer Experience

cogent-security; United States; On-site; USD 100,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent is hiring a Developer Experience Engineer to own the software delivery lifecycle, including the build, CI/CD, and provisioning systems that enable engineers and agents to ship securely and quickly. You will help agents build, deploy, test, and verify code autonomously in a self-hosted environment.

Ideal candidates have 2-4 years at an AI startup and 2-4 years at a successful high-growth tech company, with deep experience in GitHub Actions, Terraform, and secure provider tooling.

Qualifications

• Extensive CI/CD experience with modern build systems.
• Experience delivering developer tooling for AI/high-growth startups.
• Strong IaC skills using Terraform and related tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build an agent development experience to move code from idea to production.
• Create a self-hosted software builder and secure runner alternative.
• Provision infrastructure securely and operate CI/CD in production.

Tools

GitHub Actions

Harness

Spacelift

Terraform

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 a Developer Experience Engineer on our Core Platform team to own the software delivery lifecycle - the build, CI/CD, and provisioning systems that let both engineers and agents ship securely and fast. You'll build the systems that take code from idea to production, including the infrastructure that lets agents build, deploy, test, and verify autonomously.

This is a hands‑on role for someone who has built developer and delivery infrastructure at an AI or high‑growth startup and wants to define how autonomous agents move code to production.

What You'll Do

Build an agent development experience that streamlines idea to production, letting agents build, deploy, test, and verify code autonomously

Build a self-hosted software builder, a secure GitHub Actions Runner alternative that meets our compliance requirements

Adopt and operate a solution to provision infrastructure securely

What We're Looking For

Deep experience with CI/CD and build systems: GitHub Actions, Harness, Spacelift

Strong infrastructure-as-code skills with Terraform

Comfort working in an agent‑forward environment with Claude Code and Codex

2-4 years at an AI startup, plus 2-4 years at a successful high‑growth tech company

Bonus Points

Self-hosting experience across GitHub and ECR

Build tooling experience: Pants, uv, e2b, pico

Artifactory

Prior startup founder experience

A secondary spike in Application Security

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.