Software Engineer
Cognition · San Francisco
WE ARE AN APPLIED AI LAB BUILDING END-TO-END SOFTWARE AGENTS. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. Together, they represent our vision for collaborative AI teammates that enable engineers to focus on more interesting problems and empower teams to strive for more ambitious goals. Our team is small and talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro. Building Devin is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us. ROLE MISSION Software Engineers at Cognition are not feature builders. 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. This is a role for engineers who want to be close to the frontier, who can move fast without cutting corners, and who believe the next 5 years of software engineering will look fundamentally different from the last 5. 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 experience that makes Windsurf diff