Job Overview
Location
San Francisco Bay Area
Job Type
Full-time
Category
Data Science
Date Posted
April 15, 2026
Full Job Description
📋 Description
- • Research, Mid-Training role at Cognition focused on advancing AI model capabilities during the critical mid-training phase between pre-training and post-training, directly impacting the performance of AI software engineers like Devin and AI-native IDEs like Windsurf.
- • Day-to-day responsibilities include designing high-quality data mixtures, driving capability injection in coding and reasoning, developing synthetic data pipelines, optimizing annealing schedules, extending context length, building robust evaluations, and measuring scaling behavior of mid-training interventions.
- • Cognition is an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents, known for creating Devin (the first AI software engineer) and Windsurf (an AI-native IDE), with a small, talent-dense team of competitive programmers, former founders, and researchers from top AI organizations including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, and Google DeepMind.
- • The role offers the opportunity to make original contributions at the frontier of AI training, work with massive compute resources (thousands of GPUs), and directly influence real-world AI agent performance in a fast-moving, autonomous environment that values technical depth and empiricism over credentials.
🎯 Requirements
- • Deep familiarity with the LLM training pipeline end to end, including pre-training data, optimization, architecture, and how mid-training and post-training interact
- • Hands-on experience with continual pre-training, annealing, or late-stage data mixing for large models
- • Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch); comfortable debugging distributed training at scale
- • Strong fundamentals in optimization, statistics, and ML theory; able to distinguish real effects from noise, instability, and overfitting
- • Experience developing or evaluating synthetic data pipelines for capability improvement
- • A track record of original contributions: publications, open-source impact, or internal results that moved a capability frontier
🏖️ Benefits
- • Small, highly selective team where research and product move together, with prototypes reaching real deployment quickly
- • Compute is not a constraint: large allocations with training jobs routinely running across thousands of GPUs from day one
- • Environment rewards speed, autonomy, and technical depth with minimal process overhead
- • Opportunity to work on one of the most competitive and fast-moving problems in AI
- • Equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities
Skills & Technologies
About Cognition
Cognition is an applied AI lab renowned for creating Devin, the groundbreaking AI software engineer. This innovative platform is designed to automate complex software development tasks, serving enterprise clients and teams seeking to enhance efficiency in their engineering workflows. Devin's capabilities extend to areas like automating .NET framework migrations and serving as a data analyst, as demonstrated by customers like Eight Sleep. The company's credibility is underscored by its talent-dense team, whose founders boast 10 IOI gold medals and prior experience from leading AI firms such as Google DeepMind and Scale AI, positioning Cognition at the forefront of AI-driven software development.
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