Software Engineer - Infrastructure (Senior+)

About the role

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 Senior+ Infrastructure Engineer to help build a secure, reliable, cost-effective, and agent-forward foundation for running Cogent's products and services. You'll join a small, fast-growing Core Platform pod (that includes infrastructure, security, and compliance) and work hands-on across our data platform, our security systems, and the platform layer our agents use to build and ship the product. Ultimately you'll help keep the company, our customers, and our employees protected against external and internal threats.

This is an early-stage, high-ownership role for an engineer who has built core infrastructure at startup scale and can operate across many stakeholders.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build and optimize our data platform, with a focus on storage-level optimizations across Clickhouse and Postgres

- Make our product deployable on-prem to unlock onboarding for large customers - the last mile needed to land seven-figure accounts

- Harden our security systems

- Build an agent-first infra and platform layer, since agents will build our product and need a foundation they can rely on

- Drive large-scale infrastructure projects end-to-end across a variety of stakeholders

ABOUT YOU

- 5-7 years of software engineering experience with deep core infrastructure expertise and strong hands-on coding

- Hands-on AWS experience

- Experience with Clickhouse Cloud at the serving layer

- Real depth in Spark and micro-batching

- A track record of driving large-scale projects across multiple stakeholders

- Experience building in an AI-forward capacity, with agentic coding fundamentals

- Startup or early-stage background (up to ~200 people), ideally blended with large-company experience

BONUS POINTS

- Prior startup founder experience

- API gateway auth experience with Envoy or Istio

- SRE strength: agent-forward, but able to operationalize, debug, and triage

- Familiarity with Hashicorp Vault, MicroVM (Runloop), and SPIFFE / SPIRE for agent identity

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.