About Cognition

Cognition AI is building autonomous AI teammates that redefine how software is created. We're developing a suite of agentic tools - led by Devin, our AI software engineer - that operate across the entire software lifecycle. Our mission is to solve one of the most fundamental challenges in applied AI: creating agents that can reason, remember, and execute complex work over long horizons, as true teammates to human engineers.

Our team is small and talent-dense. The founding team holds 10 IOI gold medals and includes leaders and builders who have worked at the cutting edge of applied AI at companies like Google DeepMind, Scale AI, Cursor, Lunchclub, Modal, Waymo, and Nuro. Of our initial ~35 team members, 21 of them had founded a company.

We're still in the early innings - our hardest challenges lie ahead. If you're excited to solve some of the world's biggest problems and build AI systems that can reason and learn, we'd love for you to explore our team.

Message from Grant

Cognition first crossed my radar when my friend Russell joined a few years ago. Throughout the last decade, he has had an uncanny ability to predict the major trends in AI a few years before they become mainstream, moreso than anyone else I know. He's also incredibly savvy and ambitious, enough so that I was surprised he wasn't starting his own company (or rather, a second company). Naturally, I was intrigued.

After visiting the team once, the sheer concentration of both talent and hustle stands out immediately. It's actually unreal. The best way I can describe it is some combination of the folklore you hear about early days at Google/Facebook/Nvidia, mixed with the energy of a close-knit team of athletes training for the Olympics. I remember coming away thinking, "whatever this group is working on, you know it will be interesting."

The Hard Problem We're Solving

Modern software development isn't a sequence of isolated keystrokes, but a multi-stage process that spans understanding existing systems, planning changes, writing and reviewing code, testing, documenting, and maintaining software over time. Our goal is to build AI teammates that can operate across this entire lifecycle, not just assist at a single step.

That's why Cognition is built as an agent lab: a place where research and engineering come together to develop a shared "agent brain" that powers a suite of products across the SDLC. This includes Devin, an autonomous software engineer; Windsurf, a next-generation IDE for creative 0-to-1 coding; Devin Review, which brings deep, contextual reasoning into code review; and DeepWiki, which helps teams understand and plan changes in large, complex codebases.

Our approach centers on pushing agent capabilities further along three dimensions:

• Long-horizon planning and reasoning, where agents construct and adapt multi-step strategies before and during execution - not just react to the next prompt.
• Deep, persistent codebase understanding, enabling agents to build a mental model of large systems, recall prior decisions, and reason about tradeoffs across files, services, and time.
• Autonomous execution with feedback loops, where agents write code, run tests, review changes, and iterate within real engineering environments and workflows.

By grounding these capabilities in real developer tools and workflows, we're building agents that don't just generate output - they do work.

We envision a future where engineers collaborate with a fleet of AI teammates that deeply understand their code, their tools, and their goals - freeing humans to focus on architecture, creativity, and the hardest problems, while agents handle execution at scale.

See how engineering teams are working with Devin today.

Featured Work

SWE 1.5 captures how we think about building at Cognition. AI systems are capable of executing meaningful engineering work, but only if they're embedded in the right workflows. That reality shapes both our technical decisions and our culture.

In SWE 1.5, engineers don't hand off vague prompts and hope for the best. Instead, work is structured around intent, constraints, and feedback. Humans define the problem and evaluate outcomes; agents handle execution, iteration, and local debugging. The loop is tight, continuous, and collaborative.

This way of working demands different tooling:

• Agents must operate in real environments - actual repos, tests, CI, and tooling.
• Their behavior must be inspectable and steerable, not opaque.
• Systems must support partial progress, revision, and course correction instead of all-or-nothing outputs.

That's why much of our work focuses on long-horizon task execution, failure recovery, and keeping agents grounded in an evolving context. SWE 1.5 isn't about replacing engineers - it's about letting them operate at a higher level of abstraction while staying firmly in control.

Internally, this translates into a culture that values:

• systems thinking over surface-level hacks,
• fast iteration paired with technical rigor,
• and building tools we ourselves rely on every day.

SWE 1.5 proves you don't have to choose between speed and intelligence, and that belief shapes how we build.

Meet our CEO, Scott

Join

"What I love about Cognition is the urgency. We're racing to build the future of software engineering, and everyone here feels that weight and excitement. It's intense, but when you see Devin or Windsurf solve problems you didn't think were possible yet, it's the most fulfilling thing in the world" —Theodor Marcu, Head of Product Growth

Cognition is a small, talent-dense team with a deeply competitive, low-ego culture. People move fast, argue passionately about hard problems, obsess over details others ignore, and take pride in making complex systems work at scale. If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you!