Quality Assurance Engineer
About the job
- At least 5 years of quality assurance or test engineering experience testing complex product workflows, including multi-step user journeys, cross-surface interactions, and end-to-end behavior.
- Deep expertise in functional, regression, exploratory, integration, and end-to-end testing methodologies.
- Comfort reading and writing code in Python, TypeScript, or a similar language, navigating codebases, and reasoning about systems.
- A user-first testing approach focused on the perspective of real users rather than only a specification.
- Strong attention to detail and debugging ability, with clear and precise communication in bug reports and triage.
- Familiarity with continuous integration and continuous delivery and test automation frameworks.
- Availability to overlap with United States time zones and to work weekends when release cycles require it.
- Own end-to-end product quality across AI workflows by testing Windsurf and Devin across onboarding flows, chat interactions, multi-file edits, agentic task execution, and autonomous workflows.
- Design and execute functional, regression, integration, exploratory, and end-to-end test strategies and plans across product surfaces and releases.
- Break down complex flows into testable scenarios, including edge cases, race conditions, state recovery failures, and real-world usage patterns.
- Reproduce, document, and debug issues across layers, distinguishing UI defects, orchestration or system issues, and unexpected AI behavior, and work with engineering and product to drive resolution.
- Partner with engineering and product to define completion criteria, set quality standards, and ensure releases meet real-developer expectations.
- Establish quality assurance playbooks, test processes, and automation; help evolve continuous integration, continuous delivery, and testing practices as the product scales.
- Experience testing AI-powered products with non-deterministic outputs and evaluating quality when responses vary.
- Experience testing integrated development environment plugins or extensions and developer tools such as Visual Studio Code extensions, command-line interfaces, and code review systems.
- Familiarity with AI coding tools such as Windsurf, Copilot, Cursor, and Devin, along with informed opinions on quality standards.
- Prior software engineering experience with shipped production code.
About the company
Cognition builds AI agents that write and fix code for software teams, and its agent Devin was one of the first able to carry a software task from assignment to a finished pull request. Engineers give Devin tasks in plain English through Slack, the web, or the company's Devin Desktop editor. Devin then works in its own cloud workspace with a terminal, browser, and code editor, where it plans the change, writes and tests the code, and opens a pull request for an engineer to review. Teams can run many Devin sessions at once, and companies pay through subscriptions and usage-based pricing. Cognition was founded in 2023 and is based in San Francisco.
Company Size
501-1,000
Company Stage
Late Stage VC
Total Funding
$3.7B
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Founded
2023
Get referred to Cognition
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Demand is compounding: annualized revenue doubled from $492 million in May 2026 to $1 billion by late September.
- Equity is gaining value: Cognition's valuation jumped from $26 billion in May 2026 to $48 billion in September.
- Deep rollouts lock in revenue: over 75% of Brazilian bank Itaú's technology teams used Devin by September 2026.
What critics are saying
- Growth is costly: an NVIDIA server lease runs hundreds of millions a year, pushing 2026 cash burn toward $800 million.
- Expect extreme hours: in August 2025, CEO Scott Wu told acquired Windsurf staff to work 80-hour weeks or take buyouts.
- Its closest rival is bigger: Cursor, selling $2.6 billion a year to businesses, agreed to join SpaceX in June 2026.
What makes Cognition unique
- Contest-winning coders run it: all three founders won gold at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a global high-school coding contest.
- Washington trusts it: Devin Desktop holds FedRAMP High, the top federal cloud-security rating, and the Army and Navy use Devin.
- Big rewrites are its specialty: Mercedes-Benz modernized 200,000 lines of COBOL, a 1960s language, in 8 days, not 8 months.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
Flexible Work Hours
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
6%1 year growth
23%2 year growth
-4%Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla has publicly accused Factory, a $5 billion AI coding startup he backs, of lying about the departure of adviser Chris Degnan. Factory CEO Matan Grinberg claimed Degnan was terminated for "unethical conduct" involving rival Cognition, where Degnan was allegedly having secret discussions. Degnan disputed this, saying he resigned to join Cognition. Khosla, who invests in both companies, defended Degnan and called Factory "a struggling second tier competitor" lacking decency. The dispute highlights fierce competition for talent in AI coding agents. Factory raised $200 million in September at a $5 billion valuation, whilst Cognition secured $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation with a nearly $900 million revenue run rate.
Two AI startups, Factory AI and Cognition, are feuding over Chris Degnan's departure from Factory to join Cognition as chief revenue officer. Factory CEO Matan Grinberg alleges Degnan held conversations with Cognition executives while advising Factory on confidential matters and claims Cognition employees faked interviews to access internal information. Degnan denied the allegations, stating he resigned and informed Grinberg about joining Cognition. Cognition CEO Scott Wu rejected claims that employees posed as candidates to gather information. The dispute follows major funding rounds for both companies. Factory recently raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation, whilst Cognition secured over $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. Both San Francisco-based startups build AI coding agents for enterprise customers.
Matan Grinberg, CEO of AI coding startup Factory, accused board advisor Chris Degnan of sharing confidential information with competitor Cognition. Grinberg fired Degnan on Tuesday after learning he had been in ongoing talks with Cognition while attending Factory board meetings. Two hours after Grinberg's announcement on X, Degnan revealed he joined Cognition as chief revenue officer. Degnan was a partner at RPT Partners, an investor in Factory. Factory raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation this month from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others. Cognition recently raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. Degnan had allegedly assured Grinberg he wasn't interested in joining Cognition, claiming he had "made too much money" and was "too lazy" to work for the competitor. Degnan's announcement notably stated that RPT Ventures would now work with Cognition.
MongoDB has partnered with Cognition to launch Devin for MongoDB Modernizations, a solution designed to accelerate enterprise migration from legacy infrastructure to MongoDB Atlas. The partnership integrates Devin, an AI software engineer, with MongoDB's Application Modernization Platform (AMP). Devin handles code rewriting and business logic whilst AMP's tools manage data migration and validation. The collaboration aims to reduce migration timelines from years to months, allowing engineering teams to focus on building new applications rather than maintaining legacy systems. Bilt used the solution to rebuild search and personalisation features, with their engineering team averaging dozens of merged pull requests daily during implementation. Early testing shows tasks that previously took five to six hours now complete in just over an hour. The service is available to MongoDB and Cognition customers.
Cognition AI, a US-based startup building AI coding software, is approaching $1 billion in annualised revenue this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. This represents roughly double the company's run rate from four months earlier. The company's revenue topped $900 million in September, up from $492 million in May. Strong demand for its Devin AI coding software has driven this growth. Earlier this month, Cognition raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, up from $26 billion three months prior. Investor interest in AI coding firms increased after SpaceX announced it would acquire rival Cursor for $60 billion, a deal that closed in August. SpaceX had previously approached Cognition about a potential acquisition.