Cognition

Head of Safety

San Francisco FullTime On-site
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Job Description

WE ARE AN APPLIED AI LAB BUILDING END-TO-END SOFTWARE AGENTS. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Our team is extremely 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 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. ROLE MISSION Devin is one of the most capable autonomous agents in production. It writes and runs code, uses tools, takes actions in real customer systems, and operates for hours without a human in the loop. That makes it one of the most important places in the industry to get safety right, and one of the few where safety work ships to millions of developers rather than staying in a paper. You will build Cognition's safety function from the ground up: the research agenda, the evaluation and red-teaming program, the deployment policies, and the team. You will work directly with the researchers training our models and the engineers building the agent harness. This is a hands-on role for someone who has done serious safety or alignment work at a frontier lab and wants to apply it where agents actually operate. WHAT YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH - Own safety end to end: Set the safety strategy for Devin and the models behind it, and own the outcomes. - Build the evaluation program: Design evals and red-teaming for agentic risk: unsafe actions, prompt injection, data exfiltration, sandbox escape, reward hacking, and misuse. Make them part of every model and product release. - Shape training and the agent harness: Partner with pre-training, post-training, and agent teams so safety is built into how models are trained and how Devin plans, acts, and asks for help. - Set deployment policy: Define what Devin is and is not allowed to do, how permissions and oversight work, and how we handle the gray areas, in a way that holds up with enterprise customers. - Build the team and the external voice: Hire and lead safety researchers and engineers. Represent Cognition's safety work with customers, policymakers, and the broader research community. EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES HAVE DEMONSTRATED - Frontier lab safety or alignment experience: Hands-on work on safety, alignment, evaluations, or red-teaming at a frontier AI lab. You have shipped safety work that affected real models or products. - Agentic systems depth: You understand how agents fail in practice: tool misuse, specification gaming, long-horizon drift, adversarial inputs. You have ideas about how to measure and mitigate it. - Research credibility: A track record of published or widely used safety research, evals, or methods. An advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field is a plus. - Technical fluency: Comfortable in Python and in the training and inference stack. You can read the code, run the evals, and argue with researchers on the details. - Builder, not reviewer: You have started or scaled a safety function and prefer shipping mitigations to writing memos about them. - Judgment under uncertainty: You can make clear calls on deployment risk with incomplete information and explain them to engineers, executives, and customers. 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Head of Safety role at Cognition involve?

The Head of Safety position at Cognition in San Francisco is a fulltime role. WE ARE AN APPLIED AI LAB BUILDING END-TO-END SOFTWARE AGENTS. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Our team is extremely 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 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. ROLE MISSION Devin is one of the most capable autonomous agents in production.

What skills are required for Head of Safety at Cognition?

Key skills for this role include: Python, Machine Learning.

What is the salary for Head of Safety at Cognition?

The salary for this position is not publicly listed. You can negotiate during the interview process. Check Glassdoor or Levels.fyi for estimates.

Is the Head of Safety position at Cognition remote or on-site?

This position is On-site. The role is based in San Francisco.

How do I apply for Head of Safety at Cognition?

You can apply for this position directly through the employer's careers page. Click the 'Apply Now' button on this page to be redirected to the original listing. Make sure your resume is ATS-optimized. Use SpotChange's free ATS test to check.

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About This Role

Head of Safety at Cognition is a fulltime management position in San Francisco. Key skills include Python, Machine Learning. Education: Master's Degree preferred.

This role is classified as on-site and is suitable for manager-level professionals. Ghost Score 5/100 (Fresh) indicates this listing is very likely active and recently refreshed.

To apply, visit the official application page through the Apply Now button above. SpotChange Jobs provides AI-powered career tools including resume optimization, ATS testing, interview preparation, and salary negotiation assistance.