Software Engineer Intern (2027 Cohort)

At Cogna, we're working hard to solve the productivity crisis. Lagging productivity is the biggest barrier to economic growth and a major obstacle to addressing our most important issues, such as climate change, healthcare, and social equality.

But it’s not a single problem that can be tackled with a silver-bullet solution, it’s the accumulation of millions of highly specific, context-driven challenges across every facet of every organisation that have to be addressed on their own terms.

Cogna is on a mission to solve this very complex problem. We’re creating an AI-powered platform to understand these inefficiencies within customers’ operating models, to define the requirements, and develop the software itself in a fully automated way. The result is high-quality, precision software at scale.

Since our launch in May 2023, we’ve already seen significant traction and customer revenue that outpaces most companies at our stage. We’re backed by top VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we’re growing our world-class team - ex Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir - to take us to the next level on our mission.

This is more than a job, it’s an opportunity to be part of something genuinely transformative. Are you up for the challenge?

Overview

We are hiring multiple interns to join our team of experts building the future of software and natural language programming. Given the recent advances in AI, we're on the cusp of a seismic shift in the way software is developed. This is your chance to be part of it, and experience life at an AI startup.

There is a wide range of interesting technical challenges here in software engineering, programming languages, and AI: how to elicit requirements from end users, how to generate full stack code to meet those requirements, how to automatically generate tests, to repair faults, to generate verifiable code, and to deploy securely and to maintain and revise over time.

We are tackling these challenges step by step by building a working system with customers, and extending as we go, in light of feedback from real examples.

One of our interns wrote a blog about what it’s like to spend a summer at Cogna. Blogs by our full-time engineers and designers include this and this and this.

The Role

• Internships will last a minimum of 16 weeks during summer 2027, based at our offices in central London, with competitive salary.
• At Cogna, interns engage in real-world projects alongside our product team.
• Your responsibility will be to develop methods to make meaningful contributions to the quality of our product pipeline, closely guided by your engineering mentor.
• These internships are for candidates who have an existing right to live and work in the UK.
• Our working environment is fast-paced and demanding, yet also fun and closely bonded, with a low-ego culture.

Qualifications

• Achieved or nearing completion of masters degree in computer science or engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Preferred: nearing completion of a PhD-level degree in area of research that analyses or synthesises code, or AI for code
• Excellent coding skills in strongly-typed languages such as C++, C#, Java, Rust, Golang, Haskell, Ocaml, TypeScript, typed Python or equivalent experience
• Strong interest in experimenting with AI and current agentic tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent). Having written an agent is a plus but not the bar.
• Preferred: solid grasp of LLM fundamentals and how to use them well: prompting, tool use, evaluation, and failure modes. You should be able to say when an agent is the right tool (vs. a deterministic script for example) and when it is not.
• Keen to work at the cutting edge of AI-native software development. Preferable if there's datapoints to show that through research, a personal project, or published work.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills