# Edison Zhang

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Windsurf/Devin); ex-Windsurf engineer, SWE-1.5 co-author  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Mar 2025
- How they joined: With Windsurf (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/windsurf)
- Before Windsurf: Software Engineer Intern, Nuna Inc.
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Codeium (Windsurf) (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang
- GitHub: https://github.com/edis0n-zhang
- Website: https://edisonzhang.dev/
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Listed as a co-author of Cognition's 'Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model' (2025-10-29) alongside Jacob Teo, Nikhil Jha, Connor Fogarty, Gary Chang, Theodor Marcu, Albert Tam, Sean Sullivan, Swyx and Silas Alberti; SWE-1.5 was trained with end-to-end RL on Cognition's Cascade agent harness and served via Cerebras at up to 950 tok/s in Windsurf. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5)
- Joined Windsurf (formerly Codeium) as a Software Engineer in March 2025, then became Member of Technical Staff at Cognition in July 2025, the month Cognition acquired Windsurf. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Presented a Windsurf launch video, 'Windsurf now supports Claude Sonnet 4.5!' (YouTube, 58s, 2025-09-29). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds7FiTaUuxI)
- Public headline says "Engineering @ Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Turkish coverage by NTV renders the same GPT-5 statement and titles him 'Windsurf Muhendislik Lideri Edison Zhang' (Windsurf engineering lead), citing a 50% drop in tool-calling errors versus other frontier models. (https://www.ntv.com.tr/teknoloji/deneyen-uzmanlar-konustu-gpt-5-yazilimcilari-issiz-mi-birakacak,pL9IBN7GVkCgAlZzPgeD4A)
- Studied Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara (2022-2025), finishing in about three years and moving straight into Windsurf in March 2025. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Frequent collaborator Tanay Biradar: co-built 'pylot' (reinforcement learning for flight simulation) with Biradar, Conner Khudaverdyan and Casey Linden, and 'secret-hitler-player' (applying LLMs to play Secret Hitler, 2024) with Biradar and Jeremi Nuer. (https://github.com/TanayB11/pylot)
- Earlier internships: Software Engineer Intern at Nuna Inc. in San Francisco (Jun-Sep 2024), and Software Engineer Intern then Co-Op at Wolfspeed in Durham, NC (Jun-Dec 2023). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Hi, I'm Edison; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- GitHub bio reads 'Member of Technical Staff @ Cognition'; account created October 2022 with 25 public repos, mostly TypeScript, Svelte, Lua and Go. (https://github.com/edis0n-zhang)
- Previous roles include Software Engineer at Windsurf; Software Engineer Intern at Nuna Inc.; Software Engineer Co-Op at Wolfspeed; Software Engineer Intern at Wolfspeed. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Active in Data Science UCSB: spoke on its internship-experience panel with Tanay Biradar, Sarah Lew, Irena Wong and Anu Maddali, and is listed on the club's GAIA project organized by Tanay Biradar, Mitali Gaidhani and Daniel Naylor. (https://www.datascienceucsb.org/events)
- Had a UCSB Regent's Scholar distinction and was involved with Data Science Club and Coders SB, per a profile aggregator mirror of his LinkedIn. (https://aeroleads.com/in/edison--zhang)
- Solved Advent of Code 2024 in Go ('aoc-2024', 'gopher training montage') and did UCSB CS291 (cloud/web systems) projects in Ruby, including one tagged '284/284'. (https://github.com/edis0n-zhang)
- Entered SB Hacks IX at UCSB with a project aimed at the Isla Vista/Goleta student housing crisis. (https://sb-hacks-ix.devpost.com/project-gallery)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Jul 2025 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Windsurf (Mar 2025 - Jul 2025)
- Software Engineer Intern at Nuna Inc. - San Francisco, California, United States (Jun 2024 - Sep 2024)
- Software Engineer Co-Op at Wolfspeed (Sep 2023 - Dec 2023)
- Software Engineer Intern at Wolfspeed - Durham, North Carolina, United States (Jun 2023 - Sep 2023)

## Education
- UC Santa Barbara - Bachelor's degree, Compter Science - (Sep 2022 - Mar 2025): • UCSB Regent's Scholar
• Data Science Club
• ACM @ UCSB
• Peer Tutoring President
• Captain of Varsity Badminton

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/edison--zhang
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5
- https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-for-developers/
- https://api.github.com/users/edis0n-zhang/repos?per_page=100
- https://github.com/edis0n-zhang
- https://www.ntv.com.tr/teknoloji/deneyen-uzmanlar-konustu-gpt-5-yazilimcilari-issiz-mi-birakacak,pL9IBN7GVkCgAlZzPgeD4A
- https://www.mazure.fr/links/windsurf.html
- https://morganhilltimes.com/local-students-excel-in-mathcounts-competition/
- https://www.datascienceucsb.org/events
- https://gaia.datascienceucsb.org/
- https://github.com/TanayB11/pylot
- https://github.com/edis0n-zhang/secret-hitler-player
- https://aeroleads.com/in/edison--zhang
- https://sb-hacks-ix.devpost.com/project-gallery
- https://x.com/Edison_Zhang
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds7FiTaUuxI


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