Past Founder

Posted yesterday

cogent securityMillbrae (CA)

Information Security Engineers Software Publishers

SENIORITY

Director

SALARY

$100,000 per year

Apply

About the role

About Cogent Security 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 & 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 SAILAbout the RoleWe're hiring a Past Founder to own high-impact work across Cogent. You've built a venture-backed company before. You've raised capital, shipped product, hired a team, and made hard calls without a playbook. We want that operating experience applied to what we're building: autonomous AI agents that secure enterprise environments. This role is scoped to your strengths. Whether your background leans product, engineering, GTM, or operations, you'll own a workstream end-to-end and work directly with our founding team.

What You'll Do:

Own critical initiatives end-to-end - a new product area, a customer segment, or a go-to-market motion - and drive it from idea through execution
Work directly with our founding team to identify the highest-priority problems and decide how we solve them
Build the systems that let Cogent scale: processes, playbooks, and operational infrastructure that make the next phase of growth possible
Spend time with enterprise customers and their security teams, and bring those insights into how we build and position our product
Hire and develop a team around your workstream as the scope grows

What We're Looking For: Founded or co-founded a venture-backed startup and operated through the early stages - building product, hiring your first team, managing a board, and making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. You know what it means to build a company on venture timelines. Alumni of a top accelerator like Y Combinator, Techstars, or a similar program - with the operating tempo and network that comes from it. Comfortable operating in ambiguity and taking ownership without direction. You've run a company before, and you want to bring that intensity to a team that's scaling with Fortune 500 customers depending on our product.

Nice to Have:

Founded or co-founded an AI-native company in cybersecurity or an adjacent domain: security infrastructure, compliance automation, cloud security, threat intelligence, or enterprise risk
Direct experience raising venture capital and navigating the fundraising lifecycle
Experience selling into or building for enterprise security teams
Background in product, engineering, or go-to-market at a high-growth startup beyond your own company
Familiarity with vulnerability management, SIEM, SOAR, or adjacent security tooling
You've scaled a team past the first few hires and built the processes to support that growth
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.

Before you apply

Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.

Your profile is current

It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.

Two examples you can talk through

Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.

A number in mind

What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.

Your notice period

Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.

Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.