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Open nowPosted 176 days ago

Software Engineer, Infrastructure — Cognition

a16z portfolio7,337 open roles

Pay
$260,000 – $300,000 a year
Where
San Francisco, California, United States; New York City, NY, United States; San Francisco; New York City
Work mode
On site
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Your applicationOpen nowSoftware Engineer, Infrastructure — Cognitiona16z portfolio · San Francisco, California, United States; New York City, NY, United States; San Francisco; New York City

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  5. 34.2%30 days
This job: posted 176 days ago

The posting

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, apply to join us.

Who We Are

Cognition is an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We are behind Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, an AI-native IDE. Our vision is AI that works alongside engineers as a genuine teammate, not a tool.

We are a small, talent-dense team of competitive programmers, former founders, and researchers from Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Google DeepMind, and others.

Role Mission

Infrastructure Engineers at Cognition build the systems that everything else runs on. Devin executes long-horizon tasks across sandboxed environments, spawns subagents, uses tools, and does all of this at scale across millions of sessions. Windsurf serves developers in real time with low-latency editor intelligence and agent-in-the-loop workflows. None of that works without world-class infrastructure underneath it. You will own the compute, orchestration, networking, and platform systems that make both products possible, and you will build them with the same engineering rigor and product instinct that the rest of the team brings to everything else. This is a role for engineers who care deeply about reliability, scale, and the craft of building systems that other engineers love to build on top of.

What You'll Accomplish

  • Own agent execution infrastructure: Design and operate the sandboxed compute environments that power Devin's task execution, including VM orchestration, container management, resource scheduling, and isolation at scale.
  • Build and maintain the developer platform: Create the internal infrastructure that Cognition engineers depend on every day: CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, developer tooling, and the abstractions that let product teams ship fast.
  • Drive reliability and observability: Define SLOs, build monitoring and alerting systems, lead incident response, and close the loop on postmortems so the same failure never happens twice.
  • Scale with the product: Anticipate capacity and architecture needs before they become bottlenecks; make deliberate infrastructure investments that stay ahead of product growth.
  • Partner across engineering: Work closely with product engineers and researchers to understand what the systems they are building require, and design infrastructure that meets those needs without creating unnecessary complexity.

Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated

  • Deep systems engineering: Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure; strong opinions about reliability, failure modes, and operational excellence.
  • Cloud and container expertise: Hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals: Infrastructure at Cognition means writing real code; proficiency in Python and comfort owning complex systems codebases.
  • Observability instincts: Knows how to instrument systems, build meaningful dashboards, and design alerts that surface signal without noise.
  • Security and isolation mindset: Experience with sandboxing, network isolation, and secure multi-tenant compute, particularly relevant for agentic workloads running arbitrary code.
  • Relevant industry experience: Prior experience at a frontier AI lab, applied AI company, or developer tools company; you know what good looks like in this category.
  • Degree from a top-tier university: BS, MS, or equivalent in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical discipline from a highly selective program.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Base Salary: $260,000 - $300,000 + significant early-stage equity
  • Medical, Dental, Vision: Fully paid for you and your dependents
  • 401(k): Company match included

Perks: Private chef, cozy slippers, endless snacks, and more

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.

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