AI Coding Agents — Makers of Devin & Windsurf
The consensus on Cognition: A small and talent-dense team building the future of software engineering. Elite engineering with strong equity upside, but high-intensity pace.
Cognition was founded in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan — all International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) gold medalists — and is the company behind Devin (the AI software engineer). It acquired Windsurf (the AI-powered IDE) in July 2025. The team is famously stacked with competitive programming talent (10 IOI gold medals across the early team), and the company closed a $400M round at a $10.2B valuation in September 2025. The culture is engineering-driven with a relentless focus on shipping — a talent-dense team where every engineer has massive impact on the future of AI-assisted software development.
Glassdoor reviews not yet available — we'll update as employee feedback accumulates.
Devin — the world's first AI software engineer, and Windsurf — AI-powered IDE. Building autonomous coding agents that can plan, execute, and debug software.
Proprietary AI models for autonomous code generation, debugging, and software engineering. Frontier research in agentic AI. Learn more →
Small, talent-dense team of ~300. Engineers have significant ownership and autonomy. Competitive environment attracting olympiad-level talent.
Explore open roles at Cognition below.