Founding IT Engineer
cogent securityMillbrae (CA)
Founding IT Engineer
Posted 11 days ago
cogent securityMillbrae (CA)
SENIORITY
Director
About the role
Founding It Engineer 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 SAILWhat You'll DoManage and secure endpoints across our environments - device provisioning, MDM configuration, patching, and fleet-wide inventory tracking Own corporate identity and access - SSO, MFA, role-based permissions, and automated provisioning/deprovisioning across the employee lifecycle, from a configured laptop on day one through offboarding Run vendor management across our SaaS stack - license provisioning, renewals, and cost tracking for tools like Google Workspace, Slack, Linear, and Microsoft 365 Manage physical IT infrastructure across our SF and NYC offices - UniFi network switches, routers, access control systems, and cameras Handle end-user support and ticketing - you're the person the team calls when something breaks or someone needs access, with on-call availability for issues that can't wait Build automation to scale yourself and eliminate repetitive work - Python for custom integrations, workflow platforms like n8n or Zapier for standard orchestration, and AI-assisted tooling where it moves faster Define guardrails for AI tool usage across the company, and build internal documentation, tooling, and workflows that let non-technical teammates self-serve common IT needs securely
What We'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 processesAI-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
Nice to Have:
- Experience with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and supporting audits
- Security domain expertise, particularly in vulnerability management
- Windows environment administration at scale
Before you apply
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Your profile is current
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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
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