Engagement Manager - Federal

About the Role

At Cognition, customer satisfaction is paramount. Engagement Managers (EMs) are strategic, customer-facing operators responsible for driving adoption, expansion, and long-term success across the company's most critical accounts. For the federal team, this entails assisting some of the largest and most influential organizations within the federal ecosystem in adopting and scaling Devin and Windsurf. While recognizably an EM role, it is closely tied to revenue generation, functioning as a mission success role where success is directly linked to account growth, usage expansion, and successful execution of federal contracts. You will be accountable for growing strategic accounts, fostering trusted relationships, identifying high-value use cases, and converting early wins into sustainable usage expansion. This role has a strong sales component, often driven by technical credibility, tailored demonstrations, training, account strategy, and persistent follow-through. The majority of your time will be dedicated to a select number of very large accounts, which may include system integrators, OEMs, and other major federal contractors, as well as direct federal accounts. You will build internal champions, facilitate their success, conduct technical and executive demonstrations, support pilots and enablement, drive joint go-to-market initiatives, and ensure their success. Over time, you will facilitate the expansion of product usage across more teams, workflows, and larger contracts. A zero-fail mentality is expected for the most crucial federal accounts, deployments, and joint go-to-market motions.

Responsibilities

• Own and grow a small number of strategic federal accounts, with a focus on account expansion, usage growth, training, and durable customer adoption
• Build deep relationships with champions, executives, technical leaders, and end users across complex organizations
• Run high-quality M1 and M2-style demos yourself, tailoring the story to the customer's workflows, constraints, and priorities
• Identify promising use cases for Devin and Windsurf and help customers translate early interest into real deployment and sustained usage
• Drive horizontal expansion across large, quasi-independent teams within companies by turning one team win into many team wins over time
• Support pilots, trainings, enablement sessions, and post-sale execution to ensure customers and partners succeed with the product
• Help customers and partners navigate real-world blockers including procurement, security, legal, timing, internal change management, and operational adoption
• Contribute to and proactively craft joint go-to-market efforts with systems integrators, OEMs, and other federal ecosystem partners
• Act with a zero-fail mentality on the most important federal accounts, deployments, and joint go-to-market motions
• Create tight feedback loops between the field and the product team so that customer insights shape roadmap and go-to-market execution

Requirements

• Strong experience in the federal ecosystem, whether in government, military, federal contracting, systems integrators, OEMs, or closely adjacent roles
• Proven success in a customer-facing role involving strategic accounts, complex stakeholders, and technical products, programs, or deployments
• Strong relationship-management instincts and comfort working with senior external stakeholders
• Strong technical acumen with meaningful exposure to software engineering concepts and workflows. Ideal candidate has been a software engineer or similarly hands-on technical operator. Formal software engineering experience is not required, but the candidate must be able to speak credibly about software engineering concepts, understand code-related customer conversations, and become technically credible with our products quickly
• Ability to sell through ambiguity: build the case, create urgency, drive next steps, and keep complex motions moving
• Ability to operate as both account growth owner and mission-success operator in the same account
• Structured, high-agency operator who moves quickly and follows through
• Demonstrated ability to learn exceptionally fast
• Willingness to travel for conferences, customer meetings, trainings, onsite sessions, and internal coordination