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Technical Engagement Manager, Federal

Cognition ·
41
AI-Agency
B25 U70
📍 Washington, US 🛠 AI tools welcome at work Manager
DevinWindsurf
TL;DR

Technical Engagement Manager at Cognition, an applied AI lab building Devin (AI software engineer) and Windsurf (AI-native IDE). Owns adoption and expansion across high-value federal accounts through technical discovery, demos, training, and account strategy.

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Job description

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents.

We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. Together, they represent our vision for collaborative AI teammates that enable engineers to focus on more interesting problems and empower teams to strive for more ambitious goals.

Our team is small and talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro.

Building Devin and Windsurf is just the first step—our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you’re excited to solve some of the world’s biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.

About the Role

Cognition Technical Engagement Managers on the federal team own adoption, expansion, and execution across a small number of high-value accounts, helping major federal organizations, system integrators, and OEMs deploy and scale Devin and Windsurf.

This is a technical GTM role with direct responsibility for massive account growth. Success means building trusted relationships, identifying high-value use cases, running strong technical and executive conversations, and converting early wins into broader usage, larger contract scope, and successful joint-GTM opportunities where applicable. The work is commercial, but driven through technical discovery, tailored demos, training, account strategy, and disciplined follow-through rather than top-of-funnel prospecting.

90% of your time will be spent on a small set of large federal accounts or contracts. You will build champions, support pilots and enablement, lead demos, conduct training, and help customers operationalize the product successfully. From there, you will expand usage across more teams, workflows, and programs. This role requires someone who can operate independently with customers, earn trust quickly, and speak credibly with technical stakeholders.

You do not need to have been a software engineer or an account executive. You do need enough technical depth to understand developer workflows, develop and run effective demos and training, and handle routine technical conversations without relying on a separate technical counterpart. You also need to be comfortable owning senior external relationships and being accountable for growth within strategic accounts.

In this role, you will:

Requirements:

You may be especially well suited if you:

Equal Opportunity

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other 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.

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