engineering
Posted May 6Software Engineer
at Cognition
San Francisco, United StatesOn-site
Responsibilities
- - Own reliability and performance at scale: Build systems that handle millions of agentic tasks with low latency, high reliability, and the kind of correctness that developers depend on in production.
Requirements
- 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.
- You will be working on some of the hardest open problems in applied AI: how do you build an agent that can reason across thousands of lines of code, spawn and coordinate subagents, use tools reliably across ambiguous long-horizon tasks, and do all of this in a way that a real engineer would trust? You will ship systems that go directly into Devin and Windsurf, two products that millions of developers use to write, debug, and ship code.
- WHAT YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH - Build core agent infrastructure: Design and ship the systems that power Devin's long-horizon task execution: tool use, context management, multi-step planning, subagent orchestration, and sandboxed code execution environments. - Improve Windsurf as an AI-native IDE: Contribute to editor intelligence, agent-in-the-loop workflows, real-time code understanding, and the developer
- - Move the category forward: Cognition is defining what AI software engineering looks like.
- Experience building reliable, performant distributed systems; you have strong opinions about correctness, failure modes, and production behavior.
- - Curiosity about agents and AI: You have dug into how LLMs work, how agents fail, and what it takes to make AI-powered systems behave reliably in the real world.
- - Strong Python proficiency: Python is the primary language across Cognition's codebase; you write clean, well-structured Python and are comfortable owning large Python codebases in production.
- 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 &