Forward Deployed Agent Engineer, Early Career

ABOUT COGENT SECURITY

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. Our 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 needed to make 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 our team includes people from:

- Top universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and Waterloo

- High-growth companies like Scale AI, Databricks, Stripe, Tesla, and Coinbase

- Cybersecurity leaders from Wiz, Abnormal AI, and Zscaler

- Research labs like DeepMind and SAIL

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Agent Engineer, New Grad to deploy AI agents 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 have real ownership from day one. 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 our agents detect threats, triage incidents, and automate security workflows for enterprise organizations.

This role is built for engineers who thrive in high-impact environments, want to see the tangible results of their work in the field, and are ready to operate with autonomy from the start.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

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

- Own Implementations End-to-End - lead technical delivery for customers, from data ingestion and transformation pipelines to configuration, workflow design, and feature extension

- Integrate the Latest Models at Scale - experiment with, evaluate, and ship text, voice, and multi-modal models into production environments

- Adapt to Diverse Environments - work directly with customer security teams to integrate our 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

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- Graduating December 2026 or Spring 2027 with a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related field

- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (Python, Go, TypeScript, Java, or similar)

- Strong software fundamentals - you've built and shipped real projects (coursework, internships, or personal) and can debug what breaks, with or without AI tooling

- Strong 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

- Internship or project experience in customer-facing, forward-deployed, or consulting engineering roles

- Exposure to early-stage startups where scope was ambiguous and you operated across functions

- Familiarity with multi-modal AI models, enterprise SaaS, security operations, or large-scale data pipelines

FOR CALIFORNIA BASED APPLICANTS

The standard base salary range for this position is $100,000 - $160,000 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.