Talent Operations Coordinator, R&D

cognition; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognition in San Francisco is seeking a Talent Operations Coordinator to support R&D recruiting. You’ll schedule interviews across time zones, host onsite visits, and ensure a smooth candidate experience from first contact to next steps.

You’ll own ATS data (Ashby), coordinate with recruiters and hiring managers, and help scale processes as the R&D team grows. This role thrives on logistics, people skills, and calm under change.

Qualifications

• 2+ years in recruiting coordination, recruiting ops, or talent ops in a fast, technical environment.
• Strong calendar and interview logistics skills across multiple time zones.
• Excellent communication and ability to keep candidates, interviewers and hiring managers aligned.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate scheduling and interview logistics for the R&D team across time zones.
• Greet and host candidates onsite, ensuring a comfortable and professional experience.
• Keep all stakeholders informed with clear, timely updates; avoid robotic communications.

Skills

Calendar coordination

Interview logistics

Stakeholder communication

People-focused service

Tools

Ashby ATS

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

As Talent Operations Coordinator supporting R&D, you're the reason candidates leave every interaction feeling genuinely taken care of-and the person our researchers, engineers, and R&D leadership count on when they need something to just work. Part calendar guru, part host, part quiet fixer of whatever's about to go sideways, you make sure hiring never becomes the bottleneck. The people you help bring on now will shape what Cognition's R&D team looks like for years. This role fits you if you get a kick out of solving logistics puzzles fast, don't mind things changing under you week to week, and actually enjoy the chaos of meeting new people all day.

Key Responsibilities

• Talent Coordination for R&D: Run point on scheduling and interview logistics for the R&D team, juggling calendars, time zones, and last-minute changes so nobody's ever caught off guard
• Greet and host candidates onsite, reading the room and adjusting so each person feels comfortable, whether they're a first-time interviewer or a seasoned researcher
• Keep everyone in the loop. Candidates, interviewers, hiring managers with updates that are clear, timely, and never robotic
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with recruiters and hiring managers, flagging issues before they become problems and adjusting plans on the fly
• Own our ATS data (Ashby) so the pipeline stays clean and nothing slips through

Operational Excellence

• Poke at how the R&D team hires and runs meetings, and fix what's clunky before anyone has to ask
• Pull together numbers on hiring pace, time to hire, and team growth for leadership
• Help pull off team events, offsites, and research show-and-tells
• Spot the cracks in the process early and build something more scalable before they turn into real problems

You May Be a Fit If

• You've spent 2+ years doing recruiting coordination, recruiting ops, or talent ops somewhere fast and technical
• You're the person who double-checks a calendar invite's time zone before it goes out, every time
• A clunky process bugs you enough that you just go fix it-nobody has to ask
• You genuinely care whether the interview went well for everyone involved: the candidate, the hiring manager, the interviewer squeezing this in between meetingsYou can hold a dozen moving pieces at once without losing your cool
• People trust you to follow through, every time, no reminders needed
• You like people, all kinds of people, and it shows
• You know how to keep sensitive information sensitive
• Bonus points if you've supported a technical or research team before, or already know your way around Ashby
• You're based in San Francisco or ready to be

Why Join Cognition

• Real partnership with R&D and Talent leadership, not just admin support
• A shot at scaling something from the ground floor
• Plenty of room to grow the role as the R&D Talent team grows
• Small, sharp team where your work is genuinely felt

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.