Startups

Founding IT Engineer

Cogent · San Francisco, CA · On-site

← All jobs
About Cogent

Vulnerability response at the speed of AI. Cogent. Backed by Greylock.

About the role

We're hiring a Founding IT Engineer to build and own our IT function from the ground up. You'll stand up the systems, automation, and processes that keep our teams productive and secure as we scale: endpoints, identity, access control, physical infrastructure, and vendor management across offices in San Francisco, New York, and a growing remote workforce. Manage and secure endpoints across our environments - device provisioning, MDM configuration, patching, and fleet-wide inventory tracking

What they're looking for

  • Experience founding or building an IT function from zero at a fast-moving company - you've been the first or second IT hire before and know what it takes to stand something up with no existing playbook
  • Security-first mindset from working in a high-security environment (fintech, enterprise SaaS, or similar) - you instinctively reach for the more secure option
  • Strong scripting and automation skills in Python or similar - you write code to integrate systems, parse and transform data, and replace manual processes
  • AI-native in practice - you use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex daily to write scripts, build workflows, and automate tasks while keeping security controls in place
  • Project management instincts that let you operate beyond what a single person can handle through smart prioritization and process
  • Hands-on and available - this is an IC role where you're building, supporting, and responding, not managing from a distance
More about this role

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. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We're backed by Greylock & Bain Capital Ventures, 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

We're hiring a Founding IT Engineer to build and own our IT function from the...

Read the full posting on Cogent's site ↗

Engineering

Build your edge while you search

Free tools for founders and investors, plus VC Unfiltered, our take on startups, venture and the people who build them.