Cognition · 19 hours ago
Federal Account Executive
Washington, DC
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior LevelCognition is an applied AI lab focused on building end-to-end software agents. The Federal Account Executive will be responsible for driving revenue growth across U.S. federal customers and partners, operationalizing deals, and collaborating with product and engineering teams to enhance Cognition's offerings for federal use cases.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIInformation TechnologyInternet
Responsibilities
Own the full federal sales lifecycle from account targeting and capture strategy through award, onboarding, and expansion
Drive revenue across the Dept. of War (DoW), intelligence community (IC), federal civilian agencies, and federal contractors, including large primes (OEMs and system integrators)
Navigate complex stakeholder sets including mission owners, technical leadership, contracting officers, security, legal, and executive sponsors
Develop capture strategies across primes, subcontracting paths, OTAs, CSOs, pilots, and direct awards
Translate mission and technical requirements into high-value Devin use cases across software engineering, data, AI, and platform teams
Deliver technically credible demos and engage deeply with customer engineering teams
Identify new federal and contractor use cases and provide structured feedback to product and engineering
Build early federal GTM motion including pipeline generation, partner strategy, and repeatable sales process
Qualification
Required
Proven success selling technical software into U.S. federal customers and/or major system integrators/defense prime OEMs, with wins via primes or direct vehicles such as OTAs, CSOs, pilots, or programs of record
Experience engaging DoW, IC, and or federal civilian agencies in classified or regulated environments
Strong technical background as a software engineer, sales engineer, forward deployed engineer, or equivalent technical fluency
Ability to quickly learn complex technical systems, mission constraints, and acquisition processes
Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast changing startup environments with minimal structure
Strong ownership mindset with bias toward execution and results
Preferred
Have founded or scaled an early stage company
Have closed large, multi-stakeholder enterprise or federal software deals
Have experience moving pilots into production within federal environments
Have a computer science or engineering background and moved into GTM to work closer to customers
Thrive in high intensity, high accountability environments
Company
Cognition
Cognition is an applied artificial intelligence lab that focuses on reasoning and code.
Founded in 2023
51-200 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Cognition has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2022 (1)
2021 (4)
2020 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$896MKey Investors
Founders Fund
2025-09-08Series C· $400M
2025-03-18Series B· $300M
2024-04-24Series A· $175M
Leadership Team
Walden Yan
Co-Founder
Recent News
Business Standard India
2026-01-08
2026-01-07
Company data provided by crunchbase