Partner Director Japan

We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. Together, they represent our vision for collaborative AI teammates that enable engineers to focus on more interesting problems and empower teams to strive for more ambitious goals.

Our team is small and 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 and Windsurf 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.

As Partner Director, Japan, reporting into the Head of Partnerships, you will be responsible for building and scaling Cognition’s strategic ecosystem across the Japanese market. This includes identifying, structuring, and activating partnerships with leading enterprises, system integrators, cloud providers, and government aligned organisations to accelerate adoption of Devin.

You will play a critical role in establishing Cognition’s presence in Japan, acting as both a market builder and a strategic operator. This is a highly cross functional role, working closely with product, engineering, and go to market leadership to ensure our partnerships directly translate into revenue, product insight, and long term market positioning.

This role requires a blend of commercial instinct, technical fluency, and deep understanding of how to navigate and influence complex organisations in Japan.

• Have built or scaled a partnerships or alliances function from zero to one in Japan

• Have experience working with or within top tier Japanese enterprises, consultancies, or technology providers

• Have a background in technical roles (engineering, solutions, or forward deployed) and moved into commercial or partnership leadership

• Have successfully driven co sell or ecosystem led growth motions in high growth SaaS or AI companies

• Are highly ambitious, competitive, and thrive in high intensity, build mode environments

Japan is a critical market for Cognition. The right partnerships strategy will define how quickly Devin is adopted across the region. This role is not just about building relationships, it is about shaping the market, unlocking distribution at scale, and embedding Cognition into the fabric of Japan’s technology ecosystem.

Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.