Who We Are
We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the team behind Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, an AI-native IDE. These products represent our vision for AI that doesn't just assist engineers, but works alongside them as a genuine teammate.
Our team is small and talent-dense: world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and researchers from the frontier of AI, including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Google DeepMind, and others.
Role Mission
Devin and Windsurf are used by hundreds of thousands of developers every day. When something goes wrong, it goes wrong for all of them at once. This role exists to make sure that doesn't happen, and when it does, to make sure it's resolved faster than anyone expects.
You will own both the production reliability of our user-facing products and the platform engineering that lets our team ship quickly and confidently. That means SLOs, incident response, and on-call on one side, and CI/CD pipelines, deployment infrastructure, and developer tooling on the other. At Cognition, these are not separate jobs. The best SREs here understand that reliability is engineered in, not bolted on.
What You'll Accomplish
- **Production Reliability: **Define and own SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for Devin and Windsurf. Build the monitoring, alerting, and observability systems that give the team a clear, honest picture of service health at all times.
- **Incident Response and On-Call: **Lead incident response with speed and clarity. Run blameless postmortems that turn outages into durable improvements. Build the runbooks and tooling that make on-call sustainable and effective.
- **Platform Engineering and CI/CD: **Own the deployment pipelines, release infrastructure, and internal developer tooling that let the team ship fast without breaking things. Reduce toil systematically so engineers spend time on work that matters.
- **Infrastructure as Code: **Manage cloud infrastructure through code. Build reproducible, auditable, version-controlled environments that scale with the product and eliminate configuration drift.
- **Capacity Planning and Performance: **Model growth, forecast resource needs, and ensure the infrastructure stays ahead of demand. Profile and improve system performance before users feel it.
- **Security and Reliability as One: **Treat security not as a separate concern but as a reliability requirement. Ensure that misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and access failures are caught and remediated with the same urgency as outages.
- **Reliability Culture: **Partner closely with product and engineering teams to build reliability in from the start. Be the person who catches the single point of failure in the architecture review before it becomes a page at 2am.
Exceptional Candidates Have Demonstrated
- Deep experience running production systems at scale: SLOs, error budgets, on-call rotations, and incident command
- Strong software engineering fundamentals; SRE at Cognition means writing real code, not just configuring tools
- Proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent)
- Experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines and deployment infrastructure for fast-moving product teams
- Strong observability instincts: knows how to instrument systems, build useful dashboards, and design alerts that surface signal without generating noise
- A track record of reducing toil systematically through automation, not just working around it
- Comfort owning incidents end to end: detection, triage, mitigation, resolution, and postmortem
- Enough product empathy to understand what reliability means from a user's perspective, not just an infrastructure one
- Experience with developer-facing products or platforms is a strong plus
Resources & Environment
- Small, highly selective team shipping products used by hundreds of thousands of developers daily
- High ownership and high trust: you'll set the reliability bar, not inherit someone else's standards
- The environment rewards engineers who are proactive, systematic, and treat reliability as a craft, not a checklist
Compensation & Benefits
- Base Salary: $260,000 - $300,000 + significant early-stage equity
- Medical, Dental, Vision: Fully paid for you and your dependents
- 401(k): Company match included
- Perks: Private chef, cozy slippers, endless snacks, and more
Equal Opportunity
Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.