# Andrew He

![Andrew He](/resources/cognition/portraits/andrew-he.webp)

Building Cognition  
Cognition  
Cupertino, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Human Software Engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Nov 2023
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Software Engineer, Modal
- Olympiads: IOI gold 2014, 2015 (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/olympiads/andrew-he-olp-fe4c459d6e3650039eb1)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: A Simple Proof of the Cayley Formula… (2013); An Elementary Proof of the Cayley Formula… (2014); USA1 (Universal Cup) 2025; MIT NULL (MIT) 2019; MIT ZERO (MIT) 2016; United States of America IOI team 2014; United States of America IOI team 2015; MIT; Dropbox (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-he
- X: @ecnerwala
- GitHub: https://github.com/ecnerwala
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- On 2024-03-12 he posted, word for word: "Finally able to show off what I've been working on: the world's first AI software engineer.

Devin's the first agent capable of doing a full edit-compile-test-debug loop, meaning it can actually iteratively build and debug real projects.

It's pretty amazing what Devin can do, check out the thread for some crazy examples." (https://x.com/ecnerwala/status/1767617307298144423)
- At IOI 2014 in Taipei, all four members of the US team won gold: Andrew He, Steven Hao, Scott Wu and Joshua Brakensiek. Scott Wu later co-founded Cognition and Steven Hao is also on the team, so the Cognition founding group traces back to this 2014 olympiad team. (https://www.ivytrack.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1598)
- A March 2024 Codeforces post lists him among the competitive programmers on Cognition's team, alongside Scott Wu (scott_wu), Steven Hao (stevenkplus), Walden Yan (walnutwaldo20), Neal Wu and Adhyyan Sekhsaria. (https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/127049)
- Joined Cognition in Nov 2023 as a founding engineer (LinkedIn title 'Human Software Engineer'), months before Devin's public launch on 2024-03-12. (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights)
- Won the 2021 Facebook Hacker Cup and peaked at a Codeforces rating of about 3843 (Legendary Grandmaster). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_He)
- At the 2019 ICPC World Finals in Porto, his MIT team with Kevin Sun and Yinzhan Xu placed 2nd in the world and 1st in North America. The team was coached by CSAIL PI Martin Rinard with team captain Aleksandar Zlateski. (https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/mit-team-places-second-acms-global-programming-competition)
- At MIT he competed at the 2016 ICPC World Finals on team 'MIT ZERO' with Brian Chen and Steven Hao, winning silver and placing 6th. The same Steven Hao was later his colleague at Cognition. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_He)
- Placed 16th of 311 for a gold medal at IOI 2014 (score 472). The next year he placed 3rd of 322 for gold at IOI 2015 in Almaty (score 555.72). (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/5240)
- His current NAC-NAPC trainer bio says he is a Software Engineer at Cognition building collaborative AI teammates, including the world's first AI engineer. He still coaches North American ICPC finalists while working at Cognition. (https://nac.icpc.global/napc-trainers/)
- On 2025-09-02, at the ICPC World Finals in Baku, he went head to head with David 'SecondThread' Harmeyer speed-solving Kotlin Heroes problems in a JetBrains livestream hosted by Sebastian Aigner. JetBrains billed him as a two-time IOI gold medalist, ICPC World Finals medalist, double Google Code Jam medalist and Hacker Cup champion. (https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/08/icpc-world-finals-livestream-ecnerwala-secondthread-kotlin/)
- A 2022 NAC-NAPC trainer bio lists him as a Software Engineer at Impira in San Francisco, working on distributed systems for managing complex image and video data. He was a trainer for that North American ICPC championship camp at UCF. (https://www.cecs.ucf.edu/NAC-NAPC/2022-trainers)
- He was a USACO finalist (training camp) in 2013, 2014 and 2015, a USAMO winner in 2013 and attended MOP (the Math Olympiad Program) in 2012, 2013 and 2014. He also taught classes at A-Star competitive programming camps. (https://alphastar.academy/alumni/)
- His most-starred open source repo is cp-book ('Book Code for Competitive Programming', C++, about 642 stars), a reusable library of contest algorithms. He also publishes contest-programming, a public mirror of his solutions. (https://github.com/ecnerwala?tab=repositories)
- His X bio reads 'Building @cognition_labs || Competitive Programming enthusiast || I stream sometimes too'. (https://x.com/ecnerwala)
- Earned a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT in 2019, then went straight to Impira. (https://alphastar.academy/alumni/)
- His 2015 US IOI teammates were Alexander Wei (gold), Daniel Chiu (gold) and Demi Guo (silver). (https://www.ivytrack.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1598)
- GitHub account ecnerwala (created 2014-03-28) describes him as 'Software Engineer || Top Competitive Programmer', with 53 public repos and about 1,396 followers. (https://github.com/ecnerwala)
- In 2021 he streamed competitive programming live on Twitch (AtCoder ARC 111 virtual participation, template-code sessions, hard recent contest problems). (https://x.com/ecnerwala/status/1348391687022776320)

## Experience
- Human Software Engineer at Cognition (Nov 2023 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Modal (Oct 2021 - Jan 2022)
- Software Engineer at Impira - San Francisco Bay Area (Jul 2019 - Sep 2021)
- Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Intern at Cruise - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2018 - Aug 2018)
- Software Engineer at Elliot Technologies - San Francisco (Jun 2017 - Aug 2017)
- Software Engineering Intern at Dropbox (Jun 2016 - Aug 2016)
- Software Engineering Intern at Addepar (May 2015 - Jul 2015)

## Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - BS, Math and Computer Science - (Jan 2015 - Jan 2019)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-he
- https://github.com/ecnerwala
- https://x.com/ecnerwala
- https://api.github.com/users/ecnerwala
- https://cphof.org/profile/topcoder:ecnerwal
- https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/127049
- https://alphastar.academy/alumni/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_He
- https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/5240
- https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/mit-team-places-second-acms-global-programming-competition
- https://usaco.org/index.php?page=history
- https://api.github.com/users/ecnerwala/repos?per_page=100&sort=updated
- https://github.com/ecnerwala?tab=repositories
- https://www.cecs.ucf.edu/NAC-NAPC/2022-trainers
- https://cognition.com/team-spotlights
- https://www.ivytrack.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1598
- https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/08/icpc-world-finals-livestream-ecnerwala-secondthread-kotlin/
- https://nac.icpc.global/napc-trainers/
- https://x.com/ecnerwala/status/1767617307298144423
- https://x.com/ecnerwala/status/1348391687022776320


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/andrew-he · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people