Software Engineer - Data Platform (Staff+)
At a glance
Senior Software 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 connectors and pipelines that bring enterprise data into the platform and extract useful context from customer systems
- Create fast pipeline and indexing designs for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation
- Work with applied AI teams to organize, link and deduplicate data from enterprise sources
- Set the data lake’s storage, indexing and query approach, then choose and integrate platform tools
- Develop reusable system components that can support growth from one integration to thousands
What you bring
- At least five years as a hands-on engineer who has led technical work across multiple projects
- Experience building enterprise information retrieval pipelines, such as those for search engines or knowledge graphs
- Practical background with ETL workflow tools and batch or streaming data systems
- Strong command of SQL, database concepts, distributed computing and data reliability
- Experience using deployment and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform or Docker across multiple clouds
Who this fits
This staff-level role suits a hands-on technical leader who can shape data platform architecture and deliver backend systems. The position is hybrid in San Francisco.
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
We are looking for Founding and Staff-level Engineers to design and implement the foundational pillars of Cogent’s data platform and integration pipeline in order to reliably ingest and normalize enterprise data sources across many corporate and IT systems and then to enable the transformation of that data into a knowledge base that can be leveraged by other GenAI systems.
What You’ll Do & Achieve
Build the new standard for ingesting and extracting enterprise data
Your role will involve building data connectors, running data pipelines, and extracting insights and context from our customer’s enterprise environments.
You should get excited about building robust and secure backend systems that handle large volumes of data, ETLs, as well as reimagining how enterprise security teams should extract, store and access data.
Design highly performant data pipelines and indexing strategies that enable Applied AI use cases like semantic search and retrieval augmented generation
Work with Applied AI teams to taxonomize, correlate and deduplicate data across various enterprise sources, and architect indexing, storage and query strategies for data in Cogent’s data lake.
Architect the modern data platform for Gen AI
The LLM stack and Gen AI landscape is changing everyday. You’ll be front and center of making build vs buy decisions for various tools and services needed by the data platform, and integrating these decisions into our broader architecture and tech roadmap.
Implement generalizable design patterns and system components that allow us to scale from 1 integration to thousands of integrations
What You’ll Bring
5+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer and technical leader leading multiple projects
Experience building data pipelines for Information Retrieval Systems (such as knowledge graphs, search engines, or similar) for enterprise use cases
Experience in ETL orchestration and workflow management tools (such as Temporal, Airflow) as well as building batch processing and streaming systems with tools like Apache Kafka/Flink
Expert in database fundamentals, SQL, data reliability practices and distributed computing
Experience working fluently with standard orchestration & deployment technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Databricks, etc in multiple clouds
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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