Solutions Architect (US West)

Cogent Security; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cogent Security is seeking a Solutions Engineer to serve as the technical backbone of our post-sales motion, designing vulnerability management solutions and translating customer environments into concrete implementation plans.

You'll collaborate with Customer Success and TAMs, write actionable tickets for engineering, and drive scalable forward-deployed practices while engaging CISOs and enterprise security teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional security experience, 5+ years in vulnerability management.
• Experience scaling processes at early-stage companies.
• Experience engaging with CISOs and enterprise security teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Scope and design customer vulnerability solutions.
• Bridge technical design and product with clear tickets for engineering.
• Own the technical relationship with the TAM and security stakeholders.
• Deploy at enterprise scale with large customer deployment teams.
• Help shape Cogent's post-sales motion as an early hire.

Skills

Vulnerability mgmt

Enterprise-scale deploys

Early-stage exp

Executive stakeholder comms

APIs familiarity

Team leadership

Cross-functional collab

Tools

APIs

Job description

About Cogent Security

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 a Solutions Engineer at Cogent Security, you'll be the technical backbone of our post-sales motion - designing and scoping the vulnerability management solutions that get our most complex customers live on Cogent. You're not writing production code, but you're technical enough to speak the same language as a customer's security engineers, translate their environment into a concrete implementation plan, and write the tickets that turn that plan into reality.

This role sits within Customer Success, working alongside TAMs who own the relationship and success metrics, while you own the technical design. Over time, we want to reduce how much of this work requires a dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer for every implementation - which means the person in this seat needs deep enough domain expertise in vulnerability management to scope things right the first time.

This is a founding role for someone who's comfortable with ambiguity, has done this before at an early-stage company, and has sat across the table from CISOs and enterprise security teams.

What You'll Do

• Scope & Design Solutions - Work directly with customer security teams to understand their environment and design how their Cogent instance should be built and deployed.

• Bridge Technical & Product - Write clear, actionable tickets that hand off your solution design to engineering for build-out.

• Own the Technical Relationship - Serve as the technical counterpart to the TAM, speaking the same language as customer security engineers and earning credibility with technical stakeholders up to CISO level.

• Deploy at Enterprise Scale - Get customers live on Cogent, working with deployment teams that can span dozens of stakeholders on the customer side.

• Scale our Forward Deployed Motion - Build repeatable scoping and design practices that shrink how much forward-deployed engineering is needed per implementation.

• Shape What "Good" Looks Like - As an early hire on this team, help define the Solutions Architect function itself as Cogent's post-sales motion scales.

About You

• 10+ years of professional experience, including 5+ years of deep domain expertise in vulnerability management or a closely adjacent security discipline.

• Experience at an early-stage company - you've helped scale and build out processes from scratch, and you're comfortable operating with ambiguity rather than a fully-defined playbook.

• A track record with enterprise-scale customers - you've worked with CISO/exec-level stakeholders and large deployment teams (e.g., 30-person implementations).

• Management experience, including having hired and built out a team.

• Familiarity with APIs - comfortable with API keys, reading/writing data, and validating data in a tool, even though this role doesn't involve writing PRs.

• Excellent communication skills - able to translate fluently between customer security teams and internal engineering.

Why Cogent Security

Cogent Security is redefining how AI can proactively defend organizations against evolving threats. Our mission is to empower security teams with cutting-edge AI agents and clear, actionable insights. You’ll join a world-class GTM team where your work directly impacts the safety of some of the world’s most sophisticated organizations.