Devops Engineer - Federal

About the Role

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 and Windsurf 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. This is an unparalleled opportunity to join our team as a foundational engineer in our newly formed federal group. As one of the very first engineers in this critical space, you will not only be instrumental in shaping the technical direction and initial project successes but will also play a key role in the strategic growth and scaling of the entire federal engineering organization, establishing core engineering practices, defining our technical stack for federal clients, and directly influencing the culture of a fast-growing, mission-driven team. Your early contributions and leadership will be essential in defining the trajectory of our federal sector, making this an unparalleled opportunity for high-impact ownership and professional development. Federal DevOps Engineers are full-stack deployment experts who own and maintain the technical lifecycle of our most important federal enterprise deployments. You’ll own a narrow set of strategic deployments, working directly with customer engineering teams to scope out complex deployments, ensure compliance with security controls, and implement any needed platform modifications. A core part of this role is shaping the product from a deployability and operability standpoint. You will make changes directly to the core codebase to ensure our products can be deployed in a variety of environments easily and reliably. You'll identify deployment patterns from the field and translate those learnings into requirements that inform what core engineering builds next. When customers hit friction that the product doesn’t solve, you’re the person who figures out what should exist—and makes it happen. You’ll own the technical direction of our deployments, making decisions that shape long-term adoption, architecture, and how the Cognition platform evolves in real-world environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect, own, and maintain the end-to-end technical lifecycle of complex, mission-critical federal enterprise deployments and their environments.
• Work directly with customer engineering and GTM teams to define deployment scope, ensuring compliance with security controls and federal regulations.
• Provide technical depth on strategic deployments; serving as the trusted expert on deployment, security, and platform architecture.
• Contribute directly to the core product codebase to improve deployability, operability, and reliability across a variety of environments.
• Translate field learnings and customer pain points into actionable product direction: scope requirements, define solutions, and drive implementation.
• Build product extensions, integrations, and automation using Cognition’s APIs and platform primitives to unblock deployments.
• Serve as the key technical and connective link between the Federal team and core infrastructure engineering teams.
• Handle escalated technical issues and provide architectural judgment requiring deep debugging and systems analysis.

Requirements

• Strong engineering foundation with a proven ability to build, debug, and maintain complex, distributed systems.
• 2+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience working within the government or working in a government focused company.
• Direct experience in, implementing compliance and security controls required for federal or highly regulated environments.
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or similar; comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases
• Have a track record of pursuing excellence at high levels, in any domain
• Have operated cross-functionally—whether at a startup wearing multiple hats or by driving product/commercial thinking at a larger company