Software Engineer - Developer Experience at Cogent Security
San Francisco, CA
$100,000–$300,000from the description
Aug 2, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Developer Experience Engineer role on the Core Platform team at an applied AI cybersecurity startup, responsible for building and owning the full software delivery lifecycle — CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and infrastructure provisioning. The role centers on enabling both human engineers and autonomous AI agents to ship code securely and rapidly, including building a self-hosted GitHub Actions Runner alternative. Best suited to someone with hands-on experience building developer and delivery infrastructure at AI or high-growth startups.
Mid level · 4+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Quick apply — this platform usually takes a CV and a few fields.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,100 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 840–1,750
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 4, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The experience requirement is stated as '2-4 years at an AI startup, plus 2-4 years at a successful high-growth tech company' — these are additive ranges describing background type rather than a single total-years gate. The overall years minimum is set to 4 (the lower bound of the combined range), though the posting implies a preference for candidates with 4–8 years across both contexts.
The SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role builds CI/CD and delivery infrastructure (software engineering, 15-1252) but also provisions and operates infrastructure (systems administration, 15-1244). The primary emphasis on building autonomous agent pipelines and a self-hosted runner tips toward 15-1252.
The advertised title carries no seniority level; the 2–4 year experience bands and the scope (owning a platform domain at a startup) are consistent with a Mid-level engineer rather than Senior.
The compensation range ($100K–$300K) is unusually wide and explicitly noted as varying by location, level, and experience — it should not be taken as a precise market signal.
Claude Code and Codex appear under 'What We're Looking For' as a paired requirement ('Comfort working in an agent-forward environment with Claude Code and Codex'); Codex is captured as an alternative since either satisfies the same requirement.
Harness and Spacelift are listed alongside GitHub Actions as acceptable CI/CD platforms under the required section; they are captured as alternatives to GitHub Actions.
Self-hosting experience (GitHub, ECR), build tooling (Pants, uv, e2b, pico), Artifactory, and Application Security all appear under 'Bonus Points' and are marked preferred.
'pico' appears in the Bonus Points build tooling list but is too ambiguous (multiple unrelated tools share this name) to emit as a concrete named technology.
Read the full posting
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