# Calvin Huang

![Calvin Huang](/resources/cognition/portraits/calvin-huang.webp)

Software Engineer at Cognition  
Cognition  
San Francisco, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Software Engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Aug 2024
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Staff Software Engineer, Scale AI
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Scale AI; Google; MIT (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang
- GitHub: https://github.com/clhuang
- Website: https://calvinhuang.me
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Joined Cognition (maker of Devin and Windsurf) as a Software Engineer in August 2024, after seven years at Scale AI; the move came about a month after leaving Scale in July 2024. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- At Scale AI (June 2017 - July 2024) rose to Staff Software Engineer and was 'Infrastructure lead and generalist' and technical lead of the Platform team, overseeing Scale's core shared infrastructure, libraries and services as the team grew from 3 to 12 engineers. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Member of the 2013 US Physics Team at the International Physics Olympiad in Copenhagen: won gold, placed 8th overall, and earned the highest experimental score of the competition. Teammates on the five-person traveling team were Kevin Zhou (gold, 5th), Jeffrey Yan (gold, 24th), Jeffrey Cai (silver) and Samuel Zbarsky (silver), coached by Paul Stanley. (https://www.aapt.org/aboutaapt/US-Physics-Team-2013-Medals.cfm)
- Posted on LinkedIn on Scale's Series C (Aug 2019), word for word: "It's been a great journey with Scale AI for the past two years, from a small 10-person company to a unicorn!" and "We are building infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI applications. We've only just begun by solving the data labeling problem." He joined when Scale had about 10 people. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clhuang_scale-ais-series-c-building-the-data-platform-activity-6564213662301724672-VXz3)
- At Scale, architected the control plane and management procedures of the Scale Generative AI Platform, described as Scale's first product suite deployed into commercial customer environments; this infra-for-customer-environments background lines up with enterprise deployment work at Cognition. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Commented on an Aug 2025 LinkedIn post claiming Scale AI's original team got 'zero upside' after Meta's deal, as 'Software Engineer at Cognition': "It is false to say the original team received zero upside at scale." (comment text as indexed by search), a public defense of his former employer one year into Cognition. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zhengyudian_another-ai-startup-just-got-gutted-and-no-activity-7362169961236099074-hBIT)
- Named to Exceptional Capital's Exceptional 100 (2025) list under Cognition: 'Calvin is a software engineer at Cognition.' (https://www.exceptionalcap.com/exceptional100_2025)
- Attended the 2013 US Physics Team training camp (University of Maryland) with camp-mates including Zachary Bogorad, Kevin Zhu, Grace Lin, Kevin Fei, Matthew Huang, Eric Chen, Jonathan Tidor, Edward Park, Owen Gray, Vickie Ye, Rahul Sridhar, Mike Winer, Xianglong Ni and Lawrence Sun; coaches Lucy Chen, Marianna Mao, David Fallest and Andrew Lin. (https://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2013/teamtrain.cfm)
- Public headline says "Software Engineer at Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Drove service-oriented development at Scale by creating service and library templates used by all engineering teams, with 30 services deployed per his profile. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Undergraduate researcher on MIT's dReal SMT solver project, developing branching strategies; later first author (C. Huang) on 'Evaluating Branching Heuristics in Interval Constraint Propagation for Satisfiability' (2019) with Damien Zufferey. (https://dzufferey.github.io/files/2019_Evaluating_Branching_Heuristics_in_Interval_Constraint_Propagation_for_Satisfiability.pdf)
- Undergraduate researcher in MIT CSAIL's Spoken Language Systems group (Jan-May 2015) on the Nutrition System, improving semantic labelling of foods with word-vector features; collaborators named in CSAIL's report include Mandy Korpusik, Rachael Naphtal, Patricia Saylor and James Glass. (https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/160585/2015_annualreport_18_03.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
- APS News on IPhO 2013: coach Paul Stanley said 'It's been a while since we've had two students in the top ten like that', referring to Kevin Zhou (5th) and Calvin Huang (8th). (https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/201308/physicsolymp.cfm)
- Was a USA Junior Math Olympiad (USAJMO) winner in 2012 and a HiMCM finalist in 2013, per his personal site. (https://calvinhuang.me/)
- Software Engineer interested in all things infrastructure or ML related. Currently working at Scale AI; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Featured in Scale's 'Meet our Team' engineering blog: 'Calvin graduated from MIT with a research focus in theorem solving and natural language processing, and with experience at Quora and Google prior to joining Scale... He has been known to build robots.' (https://scale.com/blog/scale-engineering-team)
- Open source on GitHub (clhuang, 39 public repos): most-starred is a Heroku buildpack installing webp binaries (26 stars); others include SPinACh, br_ioni and Bifrost solar tools, a CUDA ray tracer, and a yarn OOM reproduction filed as yarnpkg/berry issue #4181. (https://github.com/clhuang)
- Software engineering intern at Quora (May-Sep 2016): redesigned the search indexing pipeline and built tools to move the codebase to Python 3. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Software engineering intern at Google (Jun-Sep 2015) in Mountain View: built a new search suggestions system for Google Fiber TV that cut keystrokes for top suggestions by 45%. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Led the Controls group of the Gunn Robotics Team (FRC team 192) for two years and led GRTPyFramework, a Python event-driven robot framework; contributed to the team's 2013 FRC 'Ultimate Ascent' code alongside Keshav Varma, Drew Bent and frei0. (https://github.com/frei0/ultimate-ascent)
- Previous roles include Staff Software Engineer at Scale AI; Software Engineering Intern at Quora; Software Engineering Intern at Google; Undergraduate Researcher at MIT Spoken Language Systems; Test Engineer at Sentient Energy; Research Intern in Solar Data Analysis at Lockheed Martin; Research Intern at Stanford University Natural Language Processing Group; Web Designer at Eneron Inc. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)
- Taught at MIT ESP Splash 2014 with co-teacher Charlotte Chen. (https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2014/catalog)
- Location is San Francisco, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang)

## Experience
- Software Engineer at Cognition (Aug 2024 - Present)
- Staff Software Engineer at Scale AI - San Francisco (Jun 2017 - Jul 2024): Infrastructure lead and generalist.
Technical lead of the Platform team. Oversaw the development and maintenance of Scale’s
core shared infrastructure, libraries, and services. Saw the team grow from 3 to 12 engineers.
• Collaborated with other engineering teams to help them make scalable architectural
decisions, and to gatherfeedback to shape the roadmap of Platform team’s supporting
services.
Architected the control plane and management procedures of the Scale Generative AI
Platform, Scale’s first product suite deployed into commercial customer environments.
Drove the adoption of service-oriented development by creating service and library
templates, drafting and sharing best practices with the engineering organization. Currently
used by all engineering teams at Scale, with 30 services deployed and growing.
- Software Engineering Intern at Quora - Mountain View (May 2016 - Sep 2016): Conducted an investigation on techniques to improve search infrastructure reliability, and redesigned the search indexing pipeline to be simpler, more reliable, and easier to use.
Created tools to help automatically transition the codebase to Python 3.
- Software Engineering Intern at Google - Mountain View (Jun 2015 - Sep 2015): Designed, developed, and deployed new search suggestions system for Google Fiber TV.
Reduced number of keystrokes required for top suggestions by 45%.
- Undergraduate Researcher at MIT Spoken Language Systems - Greater Boston Area (Jan 2015 - May 2015): Helped develop Nutrition System, which displays and tracks nutrition information from a spoken meal description.
Improved semantic labelling of foods and food properties using properties of word vectors as features.
- Test Engineer at Sentient Energy - San Francisco Bay Area (May 2014 - Aug 2014): Developed and prototyped automated testing solutions for various components of the MM3 energy monitor.
- Research Intern in Solar Data Analysis at Lockheed Martin - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2013 - May 2014): Created utilities to generate and analyze solar simulations; analyzed simulation output and empirical data to improve simulation methodologies—submitted findings to Intel Science Talent Search
- Research Intern at Stanford University Natural Language Processing Group - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2012 - Mar 2013): Researched and created heuristics to improve the accuracy of Semantic Role Labeling and studied the effects of using structured learning on the accuracy of SRL—received special award from the Association of Computing Machinery at the Synopsys Science Fair
- Web Designer at Eneron Inc. (Aug 2008 - Mar 2012): Programmed and maintained website for start-up

## Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - (Jan 2014 - Jan 2017)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/clhuang
- https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/201308/physicsolymp.cfm
- https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2014/catalog
- https://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2013/teamtrain.cfm
- https://www.exceptionalcap.com/exceptional100_2025
- https://www.aapt.org/aboutaapt/US-Physics-Team-2013-Medals.cfm
- https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/160585/2015_annualreport_18_03.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
- https://scale.com/blog/scale-engineering-team
- https://calvinhuang.me/
- https://github.com/clhuang
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clhuang_scale-ais-series-c-building-the-data-platform-activity-6564213662301724672-VXz3
- https://github.com/frei0/ultimate-ascent
- https://kr.linkedin.com/posts/zhengyudian_another-ai-startup-just-got-gutted-and-no-activity-7362169961236099074-hBIT?tl=ko
- https://dzufferey.github.io/files/2019_Evaluating_Branching_Heuristics_in_Interval_Constraint_Propagation_for_Satisfiability.pdf
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zhengyudian_another-ai-startup-just-got-gutted-and-no-activity-7362169961236099074-hBIT


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