Cognition FDE

Forward Deployed Engineer - Federal

  • Location Washington DC
  • Compensation 180,000 – 280,000 USD / year
  • Type FullTime
  • Team Customer Engineering
  • Seniority senior
  • Posted 2026-01-26

Original posting ↗ You apply on the company site — we never collect applications.

Extracted automatically from public job postings. Always verify details on the original posting before applying.

role details

Operate across strategic accounts, providing technical depth on complex engagements, and own the technical direction and success of customer accounts and deployments.

Summary generated by AI from the original posting.

Hard requirements to check first

  • Clearance:not stated, but the posting points to a government / public-sector engagement
  • Work auth:not mentioned in the posting
  • Travel:customer-facing; travel not stated

Skills

PythonTypeScriptAgentsAIsoftware agentsend-to-end softwarecompetitive programmingleadership

Excerpt from the original posting

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.
About the Role 
This is an unparalleled opportunity to join our team as a foundational engineer in our newly formed federal group. As one of the very first engineers in this critical space, you will not only be instrumental in shaping the technical direction and initial project successes but will also play a key role in the strategic growth and scaling of the entire federal engineering organization, establishing core engineering practices, defining our technical stack for federal clients, and directly influencing the culture of a fast-growing, mission-driven team. Your early contributions and leadership will be essential in defining the trajectory of our federal sector, making this an unparalleled opportunity for high-impact ownership and professional development.
Deployed Engineers bring technical depth to Cognition’s most federal enterprise engagements.
You’ll own a narrow set of strategic accounts, tackling the hardest problems—whether that’s architecting a deployment, building an integration, or debugging something no one else can figure out.
A core part of this role is shaping the product. You'll identify patterns from the field, build on the product edge to unblock customers, and translate those learnings into requirements that inform what core engineering builds next. When customers hit friction that the product doesn’t solve, you’re the person who figures out what should exist—and makes it happen.
You’ll own the technical direction of accounts, making decisions that shape long-term adoption, architecture, and how the Cognition platform evolves in real-world environments.
Core Responsibilities 
- Operate across strategic accounts, providing technical depth on complex engagements

- Own the technical direction and success of customer accounts and deployments

- Translate customer pain points into product direction: scope requirements, define solutions, and…

→ Cognition · Ashby

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