- Joined Cognition
- Jul 2025
- How they joined
- With Windsurf
- Before Windsurf
- C3 AISolutions Engineer
- Status
- Current
- Cognition announced a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf on 2025-07-14, including the Windsurf IDE, IP and brand, $82M ARR and 350+ enterprise customers; Baker's Cognition start date of Jul 2025 lines up with that deal, which is how he went from Windsurf to Cognition.Jul 14, 2025
- Joined Windsurf (formerly Codeium) as a Deployed Engineer in Dec 2024, about seven months before Cognition acquired Windsurf in July 2025; his Cognition 'Delta Engineer' tenure starts Jul 2025.Jul 2025
- Windsurf's official LinkedIn named him as one of two presenting engineers ('Our engineers Alexander Baker and Abhay A.') for the 'What's New in Codeium' live enterprise demo on 2025-02-19, covering Windsurf editor updates, Autogenerated Memories, Web Search, Image Upload, Devcontainer improvements and Cascade Memories. He was presenting product to customers within about two months of joining.Feb 18, 2025
- Cognition describes its Delta Engineer role as 'Embedded with customers on their most critical initiatives', diagnosing complex problems, designing solutions and driving adoption of the Cognition platform (Devin, Windsurf) from inside the customer.2026
- Spent 3 years 8 months (May 2021-Dec 2024) as a Solutions Engineer at C3 AI in a client-facing full-stack role building custom ML applications for enterprises, which is the direct precursor to the customer-embedded Deployed/Delta Engineer roles at Windsurf and Cognition.May 2021
- His LinkedIn headline still says 'Deployed Engineer at Cognition' while the current position is listed as 'Delta Engineer'. His Windsurf role also stays open until Nov 2025, overlapping Cognition from Jul 2025.Nov 2025
- His EE451 (USC parallel and distributed computation) final project repo was co-developed with teammate Nathan Frank (GitHub nathanjf), whose merged pull request from an Overleaf report branch is the latest commit, dated 2021-03-24.Mar 24, 2021
- At USC Viterbi he was a Course Producer for the Operating Systems class (Aug 2020-May 2021), writing C assignments on multi-threading, a multi-level feedback queue scheduler and file-size limits, and mentoring students three days a week.Aug 2020
- Worked as a technical writer for USC Viterbi (Jan-Jun 2020), interviewing researchers at USC, Purdue and Children's Hospital Los Angeles; pieces included AI systems reacting to novelty and ML for disease markers.Jan 2020
- GitHub account alex-baker-j (created 2017-08, 11 public repos) is his: it hosts Technical_Writing_Portfolio, described as articles published by USC Viterbi, matching his LinkedIn note that his Viterbi articles are 'available on my Github'.Aug 2017
- Wrote 'Want to Teach An AI Novelty? First, Teach It Monopoly. Then Throw Out the Rules.' for USC Viterbi (July 2020), covering research on making AI adaptable to novel rules.Jul 2020
- Summer 2020 internship at Crowe as a Data Analytics - Financial Services Consultant: built an R data-quality tool for 1M+ row datasets that was presented in an internal innovation showcase, and did regression-based customer risk analysis for a bank.Jun 2020
Client-facing, full-stack role. Designing and implementing custom ML applications for the Enterprise.
• Create, manage, and grade programming assignments related to operating systems (using C). • Teach topics such as implementing multi-threading, implementing a multi-level feedback queue scheduler, and increasing an OS’s maximum file size. • Mentor students 3 days a week to help with programming assignments and course material.
• Designed and built a data quality assessment tool using R to facilitate error checking on large data sets (> 1 million entries). • Converted the tool into a finished version including documentation. The tool was presented in an innovation showcase within Crowe. • Performed data analysis for a bank (> $500 million revenue), applied linear regression techniques to establish methods of customer risk analysis.
• Interviewed and collaborated with researchers at USC, Purdue, and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles regarding engineering advancements. • Wrote articles published to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s website and magazine. • Making AI more adaptable - teaching AI systems to react to novelty (Article Available on my Github). • Using machine learning to find markers of disease (Article available on my Github).
• Acted as the primary instructor for summer camp courses in C++ on the Stanford campus. • Created and carried out lesson plans on topics such as object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithm design. • Lead students in the creation of final projects: games built using C++ and the SFML graphics library.
