At Cogna, we're working hard to solve the productivity crisis. Lagging productivity is the biggest barrier to economic growth and a major obstacle to addressing our most important issues, such as climate change, healthcare, and social equality.
But it’s not a single problem that can be tackled with a silver-bullet solution, it’s the accumulation of millions of highly specific, context-driven challenges across every facet of every organisation that have to be addressed on their own terms.
Cogna is on a mission to solve this very complex problem. We’re creating an AI-powered platform to understand these inefficiencies within customers’ operating models, to define the requirements, and develop the software itself in a fully automated way. The result is high-quality, precision software at scale.
Since our launch in May 2023, we’ve already seen significant traction and customer revenue that outpaces most companies at our stage. We’re backed by top VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we’re growing our world-class team – ex Google, Microsoft, Palantir – to take us to the next level on our mission.
This is more than a job, it’s an opportunity to be part of something genuinely transformative. Are you up for the challenge?
Overview
We are looking for a product-focused Backend Software Engineer with a passion for developing scalable, reliable, efficient, and beautiful software and architectures. You will be part of an all-star early team, building the future of software. This role is a backend role in the full-stack team that builds our main user-facing product. This role will also closely interact with our AI and DSL teams and there will be a big opportunity to learn cutting-edge AI technologies and expand into an AI-first role.
What you’ll do
- Define, build, and maintain software backends, APIs, and services. You’ll be building complex web-facing backends, interacting with AI workflows and building out APIs/SDKs for use in other applications.
- Write and ship high-quality, efficient, and reliable code that is extendible, scalable, and observable. You know how to move fast without breaking things.
- Work in a modern stack focused on core business objectives.
- Take ideas through discovery, implementation, testing, and shipping. You intuitively know what a great product looks like and can work seamlessly with product and design roles.
- Build and help foster an engineering culture that encourages innovation and high-quality code standards, while shipping fast.
- Collaborate closely in a small, highly motivated team to build world-class software.
What we’re looking for
- At least 3 years of relevant work experience, or equivalent evidence from open-source projects.
- The drive to work at an early-stage startup. You thrive in a fast-paced, quickly changing environment.
- You’re proficient in modern backend ecosystems and toolchains such as Golang, Rust, Bazel, gRPC, modern Python, Postgres, etc., and have worked with them in complex large codebases. You understand the intricacies of them.
- You’re highly proficient in a modern strongly typed language such as e.g. Go, modern Typescript, Rust, Scala, C++.
- You are passionate about clean and reusable interfaces, but can iterate fast on them.
- You value testing and ensure your code is reliable.
- You know how to balance scalability and speed of implementation in technical designs and can lead on those.
- You are familiar with deployment and cloud infrastructure, and have deployed and owned cloud services. You as easily build out the containerization and CI for your code as you write the application code itself.
- You can work closely with a product manager to turn customer requirements into applications quickly, and iterate from there, while balancing long-term engineering maintenance effort.
- Experience building a SaaS product or having worked at a successful startup is a big plus.
- Familiarity with large language models, workflow orchestration systems such as Argo or Temporal, and/or frontend development is a plus.
Special note about career breaks: We accept candidates with career breaks and CV gaps. Life happens, we get it. Please apply anyway!
Company Benefits
- Equity
- Private Pension (matched to 7.5%)
- BUPA private health care (medical history disregarded) for family
- MacBook
- Flexible working
- Paid travel and accommodation if outside London
