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.
Overview
We are hiring multiple interns to join our team of experts building the future of software and natural language programming. Given the recent advances in AI, we're on the cusp of a seismic shift in the way software is developed. This is your chance to be part of it, and experience life at an AI startup.
There is a wide range of interesting technical challenges here in software engineering, programming languages, and AI: how to elicit requirements from end users, how to generate full stack code to meet those requirements, how to automatically generate tests, to repair faults, to generate verifiable code, and to deploy securely and to maintain and revise over time.
We are tackling these challenges step by step by building a working system with customers, and extending as we go, in light of feedback from real examples.
For our long-term vision, see our keynote presentation at ICFP 2024 in Milan: Requirements are all you need! https://icfp24.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2024-papers/36/Requirements-are-All-You-Need
The Role
- Internships will last a minimum of 16 weeks during summer 2026, based at our offices in central London, with competitive salary.
- At Cogna, interns engage in real-world projects alongside our product team.
- Your responsibility will be to develop methods to make meaningful contributions to the quality of our product pipeline, closely guided by your engineering mentor.
- These internships are for candidates who have an existing right to live and work in the UK.
- Our working environment is fast-paced and demanding, yet also fun and closely bonded, with a low-ego culture.
Qualifications
- Achieved or nearing completion of either:
- Bachelors or Masters degree in computer science, engineering or equivalent
- PhD-level degree in area of research on code analysis or synthesis, or AI for code
- Excellent coding skills in strongly-typed languages such as C++, C#, Java, Rust, Golang, Haskell, Ocaml, TypeScript, typed Python or equivalent experience
- Experience developing code that analyses or verifies code, eg, compilers, interpreters, debuggers, type checkers, static analysers, formal verifiers, synthesis tools, etc
- Preferred: experience programming with large language models
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Top Skills
What We Do
Overlooked and unaddressed inefficiencies are slowing down our most vital industries. Whether in utilities, construction, facilities management, logistics, or beyond - complex infrastructure and siloed legacy systems are hampering productivity.
Traditional off-the-shelf software can’t address these unique challenges—and few organisations have the resources for custom-built solutions.
Cogna is a precision solutions provider that uses AI to automate the IT consultancy process to identify the trickiest business pain points and create simple, usable solutions to remedy them.
We put software creation into our customers' hands, letting them describe their own challenges and delivering AI-powered custom software in days, not months or years, at a fraction of typical costs.
