careerladder.fyi › Career paths › Cognition
How people got jobs at Cognition
What 48 people did before they joined Cognition: where they worked, what they studied, which role they came in through, and how long it took.
48
people in our data got there
33%
had a graduate degree first (of those listing one)
13
typical years since first job
- The most common step right before: from other companies (77%).
- The most common way in was Business & operations (38% joined in that kind of role).
- Of those who list their education, 33% had a graduate degree before arriving and 4% a PhD.
- The typical person arrived about 13 years after their first job.
- The most common earlier employer: MongoDB (10% had worked there).
How Cognition compares
- 4% had a PhD, well below the 20% across other frontier AI labs, the 2nd-lowest of the 19 in our data.
- 33% had a graduate degree, well below the 68% across other frontier AI labs, the lowest of the 19 in our data.
- 10% came straight from Big Tech, below the 18% across other frontier AI labs.
Among people who list their education; places with at least 10 such people.
Show as a table
| People listing education | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Google DeepMind | 58 | 41% |
| World Labs | 39 | 33% |
| Physical Intelligence | 31 | 32% |
| Sakana AI | 41 | 29% |
| Cohere | 40 | 28% |
| Hugging Face | 34 | 24% |
| Stability AI | 40 | 22% |
| SpaceXAI | 17 | 18% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 29 | 17% |
| OpenAI | 41 | 17% |
| Anthropic | 28 | 14% |
| Black Forest Labs | 32 | 12% |
| EleutherAI | 26 | 12% |
| Reflection | 20 | 10% |
| Mistral AI | 36 | 8% |
| Skild AI | 39 | 8% |
| Poolside | 31 | 6% |
| Cognition (this page) | 27 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 24 | <1% |
Show as a table
| Median years | ||
|---|---|---|
| SpaceXAI | 18 yrs | |
| Anthropic | 15 yrs | |
| Mistral AI | 15 yrs | |
| OpenAI | 14 yrs | |
| Perplexity | 14 yrs | |
| Reflection | 14 yrs | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 14 yrs | |
| Stability AI | 14 yrs | |
| Poolside | 13 yrs | |
| Cognition (this page) | 13 yrs | |
| Cohere | 13 yrs | |
| Black Forest Labs | 10 yrs | |
| Physical Intelligence | 10 yrs | |
| Google DeepMind | 10 yrs | |
| Sakana AI | 9 yrs | |
| Skild AI | 9 yrs | |
| World Labs | 8 yrs | |
| Hugging Face | 8 yrs | |
| EleutherAI | 5 yrs |
Which role they joined in
Kinds of role with fewer than 5 people are combined into "All other roles".
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Business & operations | 18 | 38% |
| All other roles | 30 | 62% |
What they did right before
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| From other companies | 37 | 77% |
| From Big Tech | 5 | 10% |
| Other | 6 | 12% |
Where they worked before
A person can count under more than one employer.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| MongoDB | 5 | 10% |
| Salesforce | 5 | 10% |
Education
Among the 27 of 48 people who list their education.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's | 18 | 67% |
| Master's | 5 | 19% |
| MBA | 3 | 11% |
| PhD | 1 | 4% |
How much experience they had
Among the 48 of 48 people with an earlier job listed.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 3-5 years | 2 | 4% |
| 5-8 years | 5 | 10% |
| 8-12 years | 13 | 27% |
| 12+ years | 28 | 58% |
Where would your path lead?
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Cognition, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Cognition →
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to Cognition, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to Cognition →
Related
How these numbers are made. From 3k+ public career histories collected for careerladder.fyi (dated jobs, degrees and publications). The collection was built around particular employers, so people who reached well-known tech, AI and finance employers are over-represented: read shares as "among people in this dataset", not as hiring odds. Names are shown only when at least 5 people are behind them; smaller groups are combined into "Other". No individual profile is shown. Updated November 2026.