Help organisations trust AI that acts

About Cogna8

Cogna8 governs AI from inventory to trusted action, covering risk, assurance, AI governance frameworks and action control for generative AI.

It connects enterprise policy, governed information, operational controls, accountability and immutable audit to the moment before an AI action runs. As AI agents move from recommending to acting, organisations need governance that works at the point of execution, not only in reports.

Our platform is in early pilot and under active development, and our thinking is published in The Authority Layer and Foundations of Trusted Intelligence. We are now bringing in commercial leadership with vision.

The role

As Commercial Director, AI Governance, you will take Cogna8 from pilots to paying enterprise clients, with a clear pathway to CEO. You will work directly with the founding members and development team, and own the commercial side of the business.

What you will do

• Convert active pilots and open new ones with organisations where AI actions carry financial, regulatory or operational consequences
• Define the go-to-market strategy, target segments and pipeline, starting with financial services
• Shape pricing, packaging and commercial terms for an early-stage enterprise platform
• Lead conversations with Chief Risk Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers and Heads of AI
• Build partnerships with consultancies, system integrators and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) providers
• Represent Cogna8 at industry forums and executive briefings
• Build and lead the commercial function as the company grows

What you bring

• A track record of building revenue for enterprise business-to-business software or services, ideally in AI, data, cybersecurity or GRC
• Credibility with senior decision-makers in financial services or other regulated industries
• Working knowledge of the regulatory landscape, such as APRA standards CPS 230 and CPS 220, ASIC expectations, ISO/IEC 42001 or the NIST AI Risk Management Framework
• Experience taking a product from first customers to repeatable sales
• The ability to explain AI governance in business terms and bridge commercial and technical teams
• The ambition to step into the CEO role

What we offer

• Base salary and founding-level equity, structured to suit the person
• Founding-level involvement, with a clear pathway to CEO
• An evolving platform with a distinct position in a fast-emerging category
• Sydney based, hybrid, with flexibility for the right person

About the role

Cogna8 builds its governance record from the systems organisations already run: cloud AI platforms, model registries, telemetry and the tools that hold evidence. You will own the integrations and pipelines that make that record complete, current and trustworthy.

You will work closely with the founding team and our product and platform engineers, and your work will sit directly behind what customers see in their inventory, risk and assurance views.

What you will do

• Design and build read-only connectors in Python for AWS (including Bedrock, SageMaker, S3 and CloudTrail), with Databricks and Azure AI to follow
• Build reliable ingestion pipelines for discovery, usage and evidence data, batch and event-driven, with retries, idempotency and backfills
• Model the data that lands in Postgres so AI systems, owners, controls and evidence stay consistent and traceable to their source
• Ingest and normalise OpenTelemetry signals for AI usage, with personal and prompt content stripped by design
• Set least-privilege IAM, cross-account roles and secret handling for customer connections, and document what each connector can see
• Build data quality checks, lineage and monitoring so every record can show where it came from and when
• Contribute to infrastructure as code, CI/CD and on-call for the data platform as it grows

What you bring

• Five or more years in data or backend engineering, with strong Python and SQL
• Hands-on AWS experience building production integrations: IAM, Lambda or containers, S3, EventBridge or SQS, and the AWS SDKs
• Experience designing data models and pipelines in Postgres or a similar relational database
• Orchestration and streaming experience, for example Airflow, Dagster, Step Functions, Kinesis or Kafka
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or AWS CDK, and good testing habits for data code
• A security-first mindset: you are comfortable working with customer data under least privilege and audit
• Nice to have: Databricks or Azure AI integration experience, OpenTelemetry, or work in regulated industries such as financial services

What we offer

• Early-team influence over the data platform and how it is built
• Work on a product with a distinct position in a fast-emerging category
• A competitive package, discussed with the right person
• Sydney based, hybrid, with flexibility