About Cogna
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 inefficiencies within customers’ operating models, 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
- Build complex web-facing backends, interact with AI workflows, and develop APIs/SDKs
- Write and ship high-quality, efficient, and reliable code that is extendible and observable
- Work in a modern stack focused on core business objectives
- Take ideas through discovery, implementation, testing, and shipping
- Collaborate with product and design to deliver user-friendly software
- Help foster a high-quality engineering culture with fast, iterative development
- Collaborate closely in a small, motivated team to build world-class software
What we’re looking for
- At least 3 years of relevant work experience or equivalent open-source contributions
- Experience working in an early-stage startup or fast-paced environment
- Proficiency in backend ecosystems such as Golang, Rust, Bazel, gRPC, modern Python, and Postgres
- Strong skills in a modern, strongly typed language (e.g. Go, Typescript, Rust, Scala, C++)
- Passion for clean, reusable interfaces with the ability to iterate quickly
- Solid testing and debugging skills
- Ability to balance scalability with speed of delivery in technical designs
- Familiarity with deployment and cloud infrastructure
- Experience with CI, containerization, and managing production services
- Ability to work with product managers to rapidly build and refine applications
- Experience with SaaS products or successful startups is a plus
- Familiarity with large language models, orchestration tools (e.g. Argo, Temporal), or frontend dev 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!
What we offer
- Competitive salary and share option plan
- 25 days annual leave plus public holidays
- Excellent pension scheme matched to 7.5%
- Private healthcare (including family cover and pre-existing conditions)
- Flexible hybrid working (2 days per fortnight in Farringdon office; other schedules negotiable)
- Regular social events and offsites
- Access to gym and fitness classes in our office building
