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Head of Safety

Cognition· Research & Development
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San FranciscoFull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. Devin is an autonomous agent that writes and runs code, uses tools, and operates in real customer systems. The Head of Safety will build Cognition's safety function from the ground up, including research agenda, evaluation and red-teaming, deployment policies, and team leadership.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Safety strategyEvaluation design
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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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.

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