Software Engineer - Backend
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 27, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 14, 2026.
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 we work with our first design partners, Cogent is building a suite of backend services and integrations that will power our autonomous AI workers. We are looking for talented, ambitious Backend Senior and Staff Engineers who are excited to build in the Applied AI space.
What You’ll Do & Achieve
Design and implement key backend, integration platform subsystems
Understand business goals, product and technology strategies and customer requirements and implement supporting backend and integration platform subsystems to achieve them
Adapt and evolve systems and plans to implement newly identified design partner and customer requirements
Adapt and evolve systems to implement non-functional requirements (compliance, security, enterprise integration etc.)
Laying down infrastructure foundations for growth and scalability
Prepare Cogent for future headcount, customer, and data growth by working with a team to design and build an infrastructure that will scale and that achieves requirements in the areas of product capabilities, non-functional needs (reliability, security, disaster recovery, etc.).
Help create a robust engineering culture at Cogent
Onboard, support and uplevel future team members
Participate in, provide feedback on, and iterate interview process as we scale the team up
Actively contribute to Engineering Excellence, Operational Excellence and Recruiting initiatives
What You’ll Bring
5+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer and technical leader, overseeing and contributing to multiple backend systems and infrastructure projects
Expertise in architecting, developing, and scaling backend systems, including both stateless and stateful architectures, to support high-performance, enterprise-level applications
Proven experience with distributed systems, microservices, and serverless architectures, ensuring robustness, scalability, and fault tolerance
Strong knowledge of backend programming languages such as Python, Go or similar, with a deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization
Experience with API design and implementation (RESTful and/or gRPC), integrating with frontend systems, data platforms, and third-party services
Solid experience with containerization, orchestration, and deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines in multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
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.