Head of Safety

Cognition

San Francisco, CA

On-site

Who this role is best for

Geared toward safety professionals with frontier AI lab experience and technical fluency in agent systems, comfortable with building end-to-end safety programs.

Best fit for

Candidates with hands-on safety experience in frontier AI labs and a track record of shipping real-world safety mitigations
— “You have shipped safety work that affected real models or products.”
Individuals who understand agentic system risks and can design evaluations to address them
— “You understand how agents fail in practice: tool misuse, specification gaming, long-horizon drift, adversarial inputs.”
Candidates who can lead safety teams and represent the company externally with technical credibility
— “Build the team and the external voice: Hire and lead safety researchers and engineers.”

Things to consider

The role requires direct collaboration with both researchers and engineers, not just theoretical work
— “You will work directly with the researchers training our models and the engineers building the agent harness.”
This is a foundational role, meaning the candidate will be responsible for shaping the entire safety function from scratch
— “You will build Cognition's safety function from the ground up.”

How to stand out

Demonstrate technical fluency with Python and the training/inference stack in your resume or interview
— “Comfortable in Python and in the training and inference stack.”
Showcase your ability to define deployment policies for autonomous agents with enterprise customers
— “Set deployment policy: Define what Devin is and is not allowed to do.”
Emphasize your background in evaluating and mitigating agentic risks like prompt injection or reward hacking
— “Design evals and red-teaming for agentic risk: unsafe actions, prompt injection, data exfiltration, sandbox escape, reward hacking, and misuse.”
Position yourself as a builder who scales safety functions, not just a reviewer or analyst
— “Builder, not reviewer: You have started or scaled a safety function and prefer shipping mitigations to writing memos about them.”

Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

build Cognition's safety function
define deployment policies
hire and lead safety researchers

Typical background

frontier lab safety or alignment experiencehands-on work on safety, alignment, evaluations, or red-teaming

Skills & requirements

Required

Safety ResearchAI AlignmentAgentic SystemsTechnical FluencyJudgment Under Uncertainty

Preferred

Published Safety ResearchAdvanced Degree In Computer Science Or Machine Learning

Stack & domain

PythonLeadershipAI

About the role

Original posting from Cognition via Ashby

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.

Source: Cognition careers (Ashby)