About the Role
Cognition is an applied AI lab focused on building end-to-end software agents, including Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, an AI-native IDE. These tools represent the company's vision for collaborative AI teammates that empower engineers to focus on more complex and engaging problems, thereby enabling teams to achieve more ambitious goals. The team is small, talent-dense, and comprised of individuals with world-class competitive programming skills, former founders, and leaders from cutting-edge AI companies. As a Delta Engineer, you will contribute technical depth to Cognition’s most intricate enterprise engagements. This role involves owning the technical direction of a select group of high-impact accounts, tackling challenging problems that are crucial for long-term adoption, architectural decisions, and the evolution of the Cognition platform. Your responsibilities will include architecting deployments, developing integrations, and debugging issues that others cannot resolve. A significant aspect of this position is shaping the product itself. You will identify recurring patterns and pain points from the field, create product extensions to unblock customers, and translate these learnings into concrete requirements that inform the core engineering team's development roadmap. When customers encounter product limitations, you will be the one to conceptualize and implement the necessary solutions.
Responsibilities
- Operate across strategic accounts, providing technical depth on complex engagements
- Own the technical direction and success of customer accounts and deployments
- Translate customer pain points into product direction: scope requirements, define solutions, and drive implementation
- Build product extensions and integrations using Cognition’s APIs and platform primitives
- Architect and maintain complex enterprise deployments
- Handle escalated technical issues requiring deep debugging or architectural judgment
- Be a credible technical voice to engineering on what the field needs
Requirements
- Strong engineering foundation
- Have operated cross-functionally—whether at a startup wearing multiple hats or by driving product/commercial thinking at a larger company
- Have a track record of pursuing excellence at high levels, in any domain
- Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or similar; comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases
- Experience scoping and shipping features in collaboration with product and engineering teams
Qualifications
- Technical depth and the judgment that comes from seeing many deployments
- Product instinct — you synthesize feedback into solutions, not just feature requests
- Builder mentality — you’d rather ship something than wait for someone else to build it
- Credibility with engineering teams, both internal and customer-side
- Comfort operating across many contexts simultaneously
- Have built software at companies known for engineering rigor and want broader impact
- Track record in forward-deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or similar technical roles
- Experience with enterprise infrastructure (cloud deployments, networking, security)
- Want to stay close to customers while shaping how the product evolves
- Enjoy hard problems without obvious solutions and the autonomy to figure them out
- Have a high tolerance for ambiguity, intensity, and sustained effort when the problem demands it