Software Engineer - Backend
At a glance
Mid-level Backend Engineering role at Cogent Security. San Francisco · full-time · $100,000–$300,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build backend services and integration platform components that support autonomous AI workers
- Turn customer needs and product plans into backend systems, then adjust them as partner requirements change
- Lay infrastructure groundwork for growth, including reliability, security and disaster recovery needs
- Help onboard and develop future engineers, improve interviews and contribute to engineering and operations initiatives
What you bring
- At least five years as a hands-on engineer and technical lead across backend systems and infrastructure projects
- You have designed and scaled backend systems, including stateless and stateful setups for enterprise applications
- You bring distributed systems experience and can build resilient services with microservices or serverless architectures
- You know Python, Go or a comparable language, plus APIs, containers, deployment and multi-cloud environments
Who this fits
This role suits a mid-career backend engineer ready to take on technical leadership and help prepare systems and team practices for growth. It is based in San Francisco and listed as hybrid. The stated base salary range is $100,000 to $300,000 per year.
From the employer
About Cogent
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. Cogent’s "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 horsepower needed to make truly 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 we’ve built a team with the best minds in applied AI. Our team is comprised of people from:
Top universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Waterloo
Unicorn, high-growth companies like Scale AI, Databricks, Stripe, Tesla, Coinbase
World class cybersecurity experts from Wiz, Abnormal AI, Zscaler
Preeminent research labs like Deepmind and SAIL
About the Role
As we work with our first design partners, Cogent is building a suite of backend services and integrations that will power our autonomous AI workers. We are looking for talented, ambitious Backend Senior and Staff Engineers who are excited to build in the Applied AI space.
What You’ll Do & Achieve
Design and implement key backend, integration platform subsystems
Understand business goals, product and technology strategies and customer requirements and implement supporting backend and integration platform subsystems to achieve them
Adapt and evolve systems and plans to implement newly identified design partner and customer requirements
Adapt and evolve systems to implement non-functional requirements (compliance, security, enterprise integration etc.)
Laying down infrastructure foundations for growth and scalability
Prepare Cogent for future headcount, customer, and data growth by working with a team to design and build an infrastructure that will scale and that achieves requirements in the areas of product capabilities, non-functional needs (reliability, security, disaster recovery, etc.).
Help create a robust engineering culture at Cogent
Onboard, support and uplevel future team members
Participate in, provide feedback on, and iterate interview process as we scale the team up
Actively contribute to Engineering Excellence, Operational Excellence and Recruiting initiatives
What You’ll Bring
5+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer and technical leader, overseeing and contributing to multiple backend systems and infrastructure projects
Expertise in architecting, developing, and scaling backend systems, including both stateless and stateful architectures, to support high-performance, enterprise-level applications
Proven experience with distributed systems, microservices, and serverless architectures, ensuring robustness, scalability, and fault tolerance
Strong knowledge of backend programming languages such as Python, Go or similar, with a deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization
Experience with API design and implementation (RESTful and/or gRPC), integrating with frontend systems, data platforms, and third-party services
Solid experience with containerization, orchestration, and deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines in multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
For California Based Applicants
The standard base salary range for this position is $100,000 - $300,000 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.
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