Forward Deployed Agent Engineer

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.

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 Forward Deployed Agent Engineer at Cogent, you will design, build, and deploy mission-critical AI agents that operate in complex customer environments and drive measurable security outcomes. This is a highly cross-functional, forward-deployed role — you’ll work directly with customers to understand their needs, adapt our platform to their environment, and continuously iterate on solutions that scale to millions of real-world events.

You’ll own projects end-to-end: from initial implementation and data onboarding, to deploying in production, to integrating feedback into our core agent platform. Your work will directly shape how AI agents detect threats, triage incidents, and automate security workflows for some of the world’s most sophisticated organizations.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in high-impact environments, love solving hard technical problems, and want to see the tangible results of their work in the field.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Design & Deploy AI Agents — Build security-focused AI agents that can reason over large datasets, interact with security systems, and reliably handle complex real-world workflows.

- Own Implementations End-to-End — Lead technical delivery for new and existing customers, from data ingestion and transformation pipelines to configuration, workflow design, and feature extension.

- Integrate the Latest Models at Scale — Experiment with, evaluate, and integrate cutting-edge text, voice, and multi-modal models into production environments.

- Adapt to Diverse Environments — Work directly with customer security teams to integrate agents with their tools, processes, and data sources.

- Drive Platform Evolution — Identify cross-customer trends and translate field insights into platform improvements and new capabilities.

- Solve Complex Technical Problems — Debug deep in the stack, investigate edge cases, and ensure our agents meet enterprise-grade reliability and performance standards.

ABOUT YOU

- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in high-velocity or customer-facing environments.

- Proficiency in Python and TypeScript, with strong skills in asynchronous programming and building robust data integrations.

- Strong debugging and systems thinking abilities; comfortable tracing issues across multiple layers of a stack.

- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and non-technical contexts.

- Thrive in ambiguity, take ownership end-to-end, and prioritize customer outcomes over output.

BONUS POINTS FOR:

- Experience with multi-modal AI models, enterprise SaaS, security operations, or behavioral analytics.

- Familiarity with large-scale data ingestion, transformation pipelines, and real-time processing.

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.