SEO & AEO Lead

Cognition • San Francisco, CA

3d

About The Position

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents. We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer. Our team is extremely 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 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.

The Role
Search is changing rapidly. People still search Google, but increasingly they discover products through AI assistants, answer engines, technical communities, and other new interfaces. We're looking for an SEO & AEO Lead to build Cognition's organic demand engine from the ground up. You'll own both the strategy and execution behind how Cognition gets discovered by the people and companies looking for what we're building—from engineers researching AI software development to enterprise technology leaders evaluating how to bring agentic software engineering into their organizations. This is not a traditional SEO role, and it is not a traditional content marketing role. Product Marketing owns our core positioning, messaging, product content, research, and customer stories. Your job is to turn that expertise into a search-optimized content engine that captures high-intent demand and converts it into pipeline. You'll identify the searches we need to win, determine the right experience for each search, create and optimize the pages and resources needed to capture that demand, build our authority both on and off our website, and continuously improve our ability to rank, get cited, engage, and convert. You'll have significant ownership over technical SEO, content strategy and production, on-page and off-page SEO, information architecture, enterprise search, AI-search visibility, and organic conversion.

Requirements

• A strong SEO operator who has built or significantly scaled organic growth at a B2B technology company
• Equally comfortable with strategy and execution. You should want to identify the opportunity and then personally build the strategy, write the brief, launch the experiment, create the page, or work with an engineer to ship it
• Deeply hands-on with technical SEO and modern web architecture
• A strong content strategist who understands how to match search intent → content format → conversion experience
• Experienced with both on-page and off-page SEO, including building authority and earning high-quality links and mentions
• Commercially minded. You care about qualified pipeline and revenue, not just rankings, traffic, or impressions
• Excited about the evolution of search and actively experimenting with how AI changes discovery and information retrieval
• A systems thinker who can turn a collection of one-off SEO projects into a scalable content and demand-generation engine
• Comfortable operating with significant autonomy and ambiguity. You'll be building this function from scratch
• An excellent collaborator who can work across Product Marketing, Demand Gen, Web, Engineering, Communications, and RevOps
• AI-native. You use AI to move faster, automate repetitive work, analyze large amounts of information, and raise the quality of your output

Nice To Haves

• Experience with enterprise B2B software, developer tools, AI, infrastructure, or cybersecurity
• Experience building SEO programs for complex technical products
• Experience building content engines around high-intent commercial searches
• Experience with AEO, LLM optimization, or AI search visibility
• Experience building off-page SEO, digital PR, link acquisition, or authority-building programs
• Experience building programmatic or data-driven SEO systems
• Experience connecting organic acquisition to account-level engagement and pipeline
• Experience creating interactive tools, demos, templates, or other non-traditional content formats
• Strong technical fluency and comfort working with APIs, data, and modern web infrastructure

Responsibilities

• Build and execute Cognition's SEO and AEO strategy across Devin, Windsurf, and our broader web presence
• Build a scalable organic content engine focused on high-intent searches that can drive qualified users, accounts, and enterprise pipeline
• Identify high-value keywords and search themes across enterprise software engineering, AI coding agents, agentic engineering, developer productivity, software development, and related categories
• Map search intent across the enterprise buying journey—from problem discovery and education through solution evaluation, competitive research, and purchase intent
• Determine the right experience for each opportunity: landing page, use-case page, comparison page, blog, guide, gated resource, template, interactive tool, demo, or other format
• Own the strategy and execute against it—you won't just create roadmaps and hand them off to someone else
• Build search-optimized landing pages, solution pages, use-case pages, industry pages, comparison pages, glossary/educational experiences, and other high-intent web experiences
• Develop SEO-driven blogs and editorial content in partnership with Product Marketing and subject matter experts
• Turn PMM research, positioning, customer stories, product launches, and technical expertise into additional search-optimized assets
• Develop gated resources—including guides, templates, benchmarks, reports, and other high-value assets—designed around specific search intent and conversion opportunities
• Create search-driven product demos, interactive experiences, tools, and other experiences that help users understand Devin and Windsurf while moving them toward activation or enterprise engagement
• Build and optimize conversion paths from organic search to signup, demo, contact, and other high-value actions
• Develop programmatic and scalable content opportunities where they can create meaningful incremental demand without sacrificing quality
• Own the technical SEO roadmap across site architecture, crawlability, indexing, internal linking, structured data, page performance, redirects, canonicalization, and other technical foundations
• Develop and execute an off-page SEO and authority-building strategy across backlinks, digital PR, third-party publications, industry sites, relevant communities, partnerships, and other sources of authoritative mentions
• Identify the publications, websites, organizations, and other sources that influence search visibility and AI-generated answers for our target audiences
• Build strategies to earn high-quality links, citations, references, and mentions that strengthen Cognition's authority
• Partner with Product Marketing, Communications, Developer Marketing, and others to turn launches, research, customer stories, data, and technical insights into opportunities for external distribution and authority building
• Build Cognition's information architecture so that search engines and AI systems can understand our products, use cases, expertise, and relationships between concepts
• Own our emerging AEO / AI-search strategy across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, and other answer engines
• Understand how AI systems discover, retrieve, evaluate, and cite information and develop strategies to increase Cognition's visibility in those experiences
• Build authority around the categories and topics where Cognition needs to be the company buyers discover and trust
• Monitor how Cognition and competitors are represented in AI-generated answers and continuously develop strategies to improve visibility and accuracy
• Measure organic performance against qualified traffic, account engagement, conversion, and pipeline—not simply sessions and rankings
• Develop a framework for prioritizing search opportunities based on intent, competitive difficulty, addressable audience, and potential business impact
• Continuously test page structure, content formats, calls to action, offers, internal linking, conversion paths, and other variables to improve performance
• Partner with Demand Gen and RevOps to understand which organic programs are actually contributing to enterprise pipeline
• Build reporting that makes it clear which topics, pages, and search strategies are creating business value
• Establish the processes, tooling, briefs, templates, workflows, and measurement needed to scale organic production
• Build a repeatable system for turning PMM content and subject-matter expertise into multiple search-optimized experiences
• Use AI aggressively to accelerate research, content development, competitive analysis, technical audits, content refreshes, and experimentation while maintaining a high quality bar
• Work directly with Web and Engineering to ship technical and structural improvements quickly

Benefits

• We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed