← All roles

Federal Account Director

Cognition· Sales
Apply on company site
Washington DCFull-timePosted 9mo ago

About the role

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer. This role owns the full commercial relationship and revenue lifecycle across U.S. federal customers and partners, driving adoption and sustained consumption of Devin within mission critical government and national security environments.

Responsibilities

  • Own the full federal account lifecycle from account targeting and capture strategy through award, onboarding, and expansion, deployment, adoption, consumption, renewal, and expansion
  • Own revenue and customer outcomes across your portfolio, including both new customer commitments and growth in consumption within existing accounts
  • Drive revenue across the Dept. of War (DoW), intelligence community (IC), federal civilian agencies, and federal contractors, including large primes (OEMs and system integrators)
  • Serve as the primary commercial and strategic owner for customers, maintaining executive and operational relationships throughout the life of the account
  • Navigate complex stakeholder sets including mission owners, technical leadership, contracting officers, security, legal, and executive sponsors
  • Develop capture strategies across primes, subcontracting paths, OTAs, CSOs, pilots, and direct awards
  • Translate mission and technical requirements into high-value Devin use cases across software engineering, data, AI, and platform teams
  • Deliver technically credible demos and engage deeply with customer engineering teams before and after deployment
  • Drive successful onboarding and production adoption, identifying and resolving barriers that limit customer usage or value realization
  • Develop account plans that identify opportunities to increase Devin consumption, expand into new teams and use cases, and grow the long term value of each customer relationship
  • Identify new federal and contractor use cases and provide structured feedback to product and engineering based on both prospective customer needs and observed production usage
  • Build federal GTM motion including pipeline generation, partner strategy, account management, expansion strategy, and repeatable customer lifecycle process

Qualifications

  • Proven success selling technical software into U.S. federal customers and/or major system integrators/defense prime OEMs, with wins via primes or direct vehicles such as OTAs, CSOs, pilots, or programs of record
  • Experience owning customer relationships beyond the initial sale, including deployment, adoption, renewal, expansion, or consumption growth
  • Experience engaging DoW, IC, and or federal civilian agencies in classified or regulated environments
  • Strong technical background as a software engineer, sales engineer, forward deployed engineer, or equivalent technical fluency
  • Ability to quickly learn complex technical systems, mission constraints, and acquisition processes
  • Ability to move fluidly between selling, account strategy, technical problem solving, and customer success depending on what an account requires
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast changing startup environments with minimal structure
  • Strong ownership mindset with bias toward execution and results
  • Have founded or scaled an early stage company
  • Have closed large, multi-stakeholder enterprise or federal software deals and subsequently grown those relationships
  • Have experience moving pilots into production within federal environments and driving meaningful adoption and consumption after deployment
  • Have managed strategic accounts where success was measured by both new revenue and expansion of existing customer usage
  • Have a computer science or engineering background and moved into GTM to work closer to customers
  • Thrive in high intensity, high accountability environments where you are expected to own the customer outcome rather than hand the account off after close

Skills

Required:Federal government sales experienceRelationship management beyond initial saleTechnical fluency in software

Benefits

  • Equal Opportunity. Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any 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.
  • Data Privacy and Arbitration: By submitting your application, you agree to our Global Applicant and Job Candidate Privacy Notice and Applicant Arbitration Agreement.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
Cognition logo

About Cognition

cognition is an applied AI lab

An applied AI lab building the future of software engineering. We’re the makers of Devin, a collaborative AI teammate that helps ambitious engineering teams achieve more.

AIai-plg-top-20collaborative AIliquid-ai-recruiting-targetmachine learningsoftware engineering
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Cognition