Devops Engineer, Federal

About the Role

This is an opportunity to join Cognition as a foundational engineer in our newly formed federal group. As one of the first engineers in this space, you will shape the technical direction, define our technical stack for federal clients, establish core engineering practices, and influence the culture of a fast-growing, mission-driven team.

Federal DevOps Engineers own and maintain the technical lifecycle of our most critical federal enterprise deployments. You will work directly with customer engineering teams to scope deployments, ensure compliance with security controls, and implement necessary platform modifications.

A core part of this role is shaping the product from a deployability and operability standpoint. You will contribute directly to the core codebase to ensure products deploy easily and reliably across varied environments, translating field learnings into requirements for core engineering.

Core Responsibilities

• Architect, own, and maintain the end-to-end technical lifecycle of complex, mission-critical federal enterprise deployments and their environments.
• Work directly with customer engineering and GTM teams to define deployment scope, ensuring compliance with security controls and federal regulations.
• Provide technical depth on strategic deployments, serving as the trusted expert on deployment, security, and platform architecture.
• Contribute directly to the core product codebase to improve deployability, operability, and reliability across a variety of environments.
• Translate field learnings and customer pain points into actionable product direction: scope requirements, define solutions, and drive implementation.
• Build product extensions, integrations, and automation using Cognition’s APIs and platform primitives to unblock deployments.
• Serve as the key technical link between the Federal team and core infrastructure engineering teams.
• Handle escalated technical issues and provide architectural judgment requiring deep debugging and systems analysis.

Requirements

• Strong engineering foundation with a proven ability to build, debug, and maintain complex, distributed systems.
• 2+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience working within the government or at a government-focused company.
• Direct experience implementing compliance and security controls required for federal or highly regulated environments.
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or similar; comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases.
• Track record of pursuing excellence at high levels in any domain.
• Experience operating cross-functionally across product, commercial, and technical disciplines.

Nice to Have

• Experience building or contributing to software at companies known for engineering rigor.
• Enjoyment of hard, ambiguous problems with autonomy to solve them.
• High tolerance for ambiguity, intensity, and sustained effort for mission-critical work.