Working at Cognition in 2026: The Company Behind Devin & Its Extreme Performance Culture

Cognition is the most polarizing company in AI right now. Founded in August 2023 by three IOI gold medalists — Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan — the company went from zero to a $10.2 billion valuation in two years. Its product, Devin, is an autonomous AI software engineer that generated $73 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025. After acquiring Windsurf (formerly Codeium) in a deal that landed them $82M of additional ARR and 350+ enterprise customers, Cognition is now in talks to raise at a $25 billion valuation.

Those are the headline numbers. But what is it actually like to work there? We dug into employee accounts, the company’s own blog posts, and a detailed SF Standard profile to build a picture of Cognition as an employer. The answer is not simple — this is a company that explicitly rejects work-life balance as a goal, where the CEO offered nine months of severance to anyone unwilling to commit to the grind. Whether that sounds exhilarating or exhausting tells you a lot about whether you belong there.

Cognition at a Glance

The Founding Story: When Competitive Programmers Build a Company

To understand Cognition’s culture, you have to start with who built it. Scott Wu won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics. He was the 2011 MathCounts national champion. He dropped out of Harvard to co-found Lunchclub, an AI networking platform, where he served as CTO from 2017 to 2022. Steven Hao earned IOI gold in 2014, studied mathematics and computer science at MIT, and was one of the earliest engineers at Scale AI. Walden Yan won IOI gold in 2020.

When the three founded Cognition in August 2023, their initial team of 10 engineers held a combined 10 IOI gold medals. That included Gennady Korotkevich, widely regarded as the greatest competitive programmer alive, and Andrew He. The team also drew from Cursor, Modal, Google DeepMind, Waymo, and Nuro.

This matters for culture because competitive programming breeds a specific mindset: obsessive optimization, extreme focus, and a comfort with working at maximum intensity for extended periods. That mindset became the company’s operating system.

The “Extreme Performance Culture”

Scott Wu doesn’t try to hide it. In a March 2026 profile by the SF Standard, he described Cognition’s work environment as an “extreme performance culture.” The reporting reveals specifics that most startups would keep quiet:

• The team typically arrives before the 11:30 AM daily all-hands meeting — and often stays past midnight
• Weekend work is routine, not exceptional. Founding engineer Adhyyan Sekhsaria noted the team had worked until 3 AM the day before his interview
• After acquiring Windsurf, Wu offered buyouts and nine months of severance to any Windsurf employees unwilling to match this pace
• The schedule goes “even further than 996” (the infamous Chinese tech schedule of 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week)

This is not a company that pretends to value balance while quietly expecting 60-hour weeks. Cognition is transparent about the trade-off: you will work harder here than almost anywhere else in tech. In return, you get to work alongside some of the most talented engineers on the planet, on one of the highest-stakes problems in AI, with equity that could be worth transformative money if the $25B valuation materializes.

What Daily Life Looks Like

Despite the intensity, Cognition has invested in making the office feel like home — literally. Employees assemble at long tables in the atrium for “family dinner,” with private chefs cooking century-egg congee and Korean short ribs. The San Francisco office features a rooftop with city views, a fitness center (stocked with Devin-branded creatine), and an underground speakeasy with a Cognition-branded poker table and Super Smash Bros. Melee setup.

The perks aren’t performative wellness theater. They’re practical infrastructure for a team that spends most of its waking hours in the same building. When your engineers are routinely working 14+ hour days, feeding them well and giving them places to decompress between sprints isn’t a luxury — it’s operational necessity.

The daily all-hands at 11:30 AM functions as the heartbeat of the company. At 305 employees, Cognition is still small enough that a single standup can keep everyone aligned. The flat structure means individual engineers have direct access to the founders and can influence technical direction without navigating layers of management. This is one of the genuine advantages of joining now, before the company scales past the point where that’s possible.

The Windsurf Acquisition: A Company That Doubled Overnight

The most significant event in Cognition’s short history happened in July 2025. Google hired away Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and several research leaders in a $2.4 billion acqui-hire deal — just hours after OpenAI’s $3 billion acquisition offer expired. This left much of Windsurf’s 250-person team without leadership.

Cognition moved fast. Scott Wu made the first call after 5 PM on a Friday and had a signed agreement by Monday morning. The deal brought Cognition Windsurf’s trademark, $82 million of ARR, 350+ enterprise customers, hundreds of thousands of daily active users, and world-class GTM and engineering teams.

The integration shipped in waves through early 2026: SWE-1.5 (a proprietary coding model reportedly 13x faster than competing models), Codemaps, embedded Devin, and a price cut that brought Windsurf’s Pro tier to $15/month. The combined enterprise ARR grew more than 30% post-acquisition.

For employees, the acquisition created both opportunity and turbulence. Windsurf engineers who stayed got access to Cognition’s frontier research and equity in a company potentially worth $25B. Those who couldn’t match the pace got generous exit packages. It was a clean, if ruthless, filter.

Employee Perspectives: The Honest Picture

What people love

The consistent theme is talent density. At 305 people with 10 IOI gold medalists on the team, the average colleague quality is extraordinarily high. Multiple accounts describe the environment as intellectually stimulating in a way that larger companies can’t replicate — you’re not explaining basic concepts to skip-level managers, you’re debating implementation details with people who’ve solved problems at the world championship level.

What people find challenging

The 3.2 work-life balance score is one of the lowest in our directory. For comparison, Anthropic scores 3.5, OpenAI scores 3.3, and Linear scores 4.4. If balance is your priority, Cognition is the wrong place. If you want to be surrounded by exceptional people solving a genuinely hard problem at breakneck speed, it might be exactly right.

Compensation & Equity

Public compensation data for Cognition is thin — the company only has ~305 employees and was founded less than three years ago. Early salary reports suggest base salaries for software engineers in the $92K–$127K range, but these numbers almost certainly don’t capture the full picture.

For a company raising at $25B with $73M+ ARR, the equity component is likely substantial. Cognition competes for talent against Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind — all of which offer total compensation well into the $300K–$500K+ range for senior engineers. A company that hires IOI gold medalists is not doing so with below-market packages.

The real compensation story at Cognition is equity. At a $10.2B valuation (potentially $25B), early employees with meaningful equity grants are positioned for the kind of outcome that makes the 3 AM nights worthwhile in retrospect — assuming the company continues its trajectory. That’s a significant “if,” but the ARR growth and enterprise traction make it a more credible bet than most startups at this stage.

Engineering & Product: What You’d Actually Build

Cognition’s engineering work spans two major product surfaces since the Windsurf acquisition:

Devin — Autonomous AI Software Engineer

Devin is Cognition’s flagship product: an AI agent that can autonomously plan, write, debug, and deploy code. It operates in its own sandboxed environment with a full development setup — shell, browser, code editor. According to Cognition’s own evaluation, Devin is “senior-level at codebase understanding but junior at execution” — a refreshingly honest self-assessment. It excels at tasks with clear requirements that would take a junior engineer 4–8 hours.

Windsurf — AI-Powered IDE

Post-acquisition, the Windsurf IDE gives Cognition a second product surface: an intelligent code editor with embedded Devin capabilities, Codemaps for codebase navigation, and SWE-1.5 as the underlying model. The $15/month Pro tier has driven rapid user growth.

Tech stack

Engineering roles at Cognition tend to fall into three buckets: research (post-training, model capabilities), product engineering (Devin and Windsurf surfaces), and infrastructure (the sandboxing, orchestration, and deployment systems that let AI agents safely execute code). The “Special Projects Engineer” role on their Ashby board suggests high-autonomy, cross-cutting work — the kind of role where you define the problem as much as you solve it.

Who Thrives at Cognition

Based on the culture signals, founding team DNA, and employee accounts, here’s who tends to do well:

• Competitive by nature. The founding team are literal world champions. If you have a competitive programming background, or just the instinct to optimize relentlessly, you’ll fit the energy. If you find that exhausting, you won’t.
• Builders who ship. Cognition went from idea to $73M ARR in under two years. The ship-fast value is not aspirational — it’s survival. If you need months of planning before writing code, look elsewhere.
• People who want outsized equity outcomes. The combination of rapid valuation growth, strong ARR, and a small employee count means equity stakes could be unusually valuable. If you’re optimizing for total lifetime earnings rather than annual salary, the math here is compelling.
• Engineers who want to work on the frontier. Building autonomous coding agents is one of the hardest and most consequential problems in AI right now. If you want to work on something that could fundamentally change how software is built, this is one of a handful of places where that’s the actual mission, not a slide deck aspiration.

Cognition is not for people who value work-life balance, remote flexibility, or structured career progression. The 3.2 WLB score is real. The in-person San Francisco requirement is non-negotiable. And at 305 people, there aren’t established career ladders — you advance by shipping things that matter. If you want a company with clear boundaries and a 4.0+ WLB score, consider Notion, Linear, or HubSpot instead.

Open Positions at Cognition

Cognition currently has 59 open positions on our platform, spanning research, engineering, and go-to-market roles. Notable listings include Special Projects Engineer, Research Post-Training, Deployed Engineer, and HR Operations roles. The Riyadh posting for an HR coordinator suggests international expansion plans.

For a company growing this fast, the window to join at ~305 employees is closing. By the time the $25B round closes, the employee count will likely be significantly higher — and the equity grants proportionally smaller. If the culture described in this article resonates with you, the timing is favorable.