AI Engineer Fellowship - Cogna Academy

Location: London (hybrid). Type: Fixed-term, 6 months, with possibility for a full-time contract afterwards based on performance. Eligibility: Right to work in the UK. Start date: January 1st, 2026. We live in a world that runs on physical industries like energy, logistics, manufacturing. These sectors are essential to our economy and daily lives, yet they are held back by inefficiencies, fragile legacy systems, and decades-old ways of working. This is not just a business problem; it is a societal one. When grids fail, supply chains stall, or factories falter, entire economies are disrupted. These companies face unique, complex challenges that typical software was never designed to solve. Cogna was founded to change this. Our mission is to give critical industries their own AI-powered Software Factory: a way to build and deploy bespoke digital tools that solve pressing operational challenges. Since our launch in May 2023, we've seen incredible customer traction and revenue growth. We're backed by leading VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we're building a world-class team to take on one of the most important challenges of our time. Tackling challenges at this scale takes people who are curious, adaptable, and motivated by impact. If our mission resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn't match every requirement. We are committed to building a diverse team that reflects the industries and societies we serve. Why this fellowship? The Cogna Academy is a cohort-based program for hungry, curious, hard-working builders that want to go beyond what you learned in school. The world is changing fast and LLMs open up unprecedented opportunities, but while university teaches you the theory, the Cogna Academy teaches you how to have impact and become a top-tier AI engineer. You'll learn faster than you've ever done before by shipping real complex features to production in a fast-moving high-growth startup environment, fully embedded in our world-class engineering team. Our engineers have decades of combined experience solving extremely hard technical problems in AI and software engineering and come from top teams at Palantir, Google, etc. Apart from gaining real-world experience, you'll also receive weekly 1:1 coaching from and pair programming directly with our co-founder, and weekly training sessions with the rest of the cohort on software engineering & AI topics. We care less about where you studied and the theory you know, and more about what you've built and how fast you learn. What You'll Do • Ship features in our product and be fully embedded in the product engineering team • Work in a modern software stack (Go, Python, Postgres, Kubernetes, etc.) with state-of-the-art AI models and tooling, and an AI-first culture • Build and evaluate LLM-powered workflows, tooling, evaluations and product features • Pair regularly with your mentor; demo work, document decisions, and learn from incidents • Grow and developer incredibly fast as a AI engineer. Learn from your mentor and other cohort members on AI & software engineering topics, focused on real-world applications and experience that is useful in industry. Our goal is to make you a 10x engineer • Our working environment is fast-paced and demanding, yet also fun and closely bonded, with a low-ego culture What we're looking for • Builder energy: you've shipped personal, open-source, work, or school projects or have been tinkering with interesting technologies. Show us links! • Education: Either a Bachelor, Masters, or PhD-level degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent; or strong open-source or otherwise public evidence of relevant projects you've worked on • Solid programming fundamentals in at least one strongly-typed programming language (Typescript, Go, Rust, Go, Haskell, etc.) or extensive experience in Python. You've built real projects in those languages • Curiosity + grit: you are inherently curious, go really deep on topics you're interested in, don't give up, and learn extremely fast • Team player: you're a respectful, low-ego collaborator who is open to learn, and open to help others • Experience with building on LLMs for code analysis or programming languages, or experience with compilers, type checkers, or domain-specific languages are nice-to-haves What you'll get • Competitive pay • A high-growth AI-first startup environment with a modern tech stack and world-class engineering team • Dedicated weekly 1:1 mentoring from our co-founder and pairing with experienced engineers, as well as structured group learning, to accelerate your path towards becoming a top-tier software & AI engineer • Real impact on a product used by customers • A path to a full-time offer upon completion, based on performance