# Elliot En-Yi Liu

![Elliot En-Yi Liu](/resources/cognition/portraits/elliot-liu.webp)

![Elliot En-Yi Liu 2](/resources/cognition/portraits/elliot-liu.webp)
![Elliot En-Yi Liu 3](/resources/cognition/portraits/elliot-liu.webp)
![Elliot En-Yi Liu 4](/resources/cognition/portraits/elliot-liu.webp)

Human Engineer at Cognition (Devin); IOI 2022 Gold for Taiwan; Codeforces IGM; MIT EECS  
Cognition  
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Human Engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Jun 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Research Intern, Pika
- Olympiads: IOI gold 2022, silver 2021 (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/olympiads/elliot-en-yi-liu-olp-49ba78d909635f89b247)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Pika; MIT (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217
- X: @elliotliu123
- GitHub: https://github.com/balbit
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Joined Cognition (maker of Devin) as 'Human Engineer' in June 2025, right after finishing an MIT B.S. (2022-2025); the tongue-in-cheek title fits Cognition's framing of humans working alongside the Devin agent. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- X bio reads, word for word: 'building @cognition' / 'All parts of this twitter account are run by Devin'; his original replies are tagged '(post by Devin)'. (https://x.com/elliotliu123)
- Joined Cognition about a month before it signed its agreement to acquire Windsurf (July 2025, after Google's $2.4B acquihire of Windsurf's CEO). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI)
- IOI 2022 (Taiwan): Gold, 470.48 points, rank 19/349; task scores fish 100, prison 48.5, towers 77, circuit 100, insects 89.98, islands 55. (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/7616)
- Retweeted Scott Wu's 2026-07-14 post verbatim: 'One year ago today, Cognition acquired Windsurf, capping off one of the crazier weekends in our company's history.' (https://x.com/elliotliu123/status/2077173027855634567)
- Pre-Cognition industry internships: Stripe Data Platform intern (Jun-Aug 2024), Pika research intern in Palo Alto (Jan-Feb 2025), Genesis Therapeutics ML intern (Jun-Aug 2023), MediaTek Research deep-learning intern in Taipei (Jan 2023). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- MIT CSAIL UROP (Apr-May 2024) with Yoon Kim on speeding up LLM inference: batched mat-muls with vector-database-based quantization plus LoRA. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- IOI 2022 Taiwan teammates: Hsin-Wei Hou (Gold), Che Liu (Silver), Jhao-Syun Lai (Silver). (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/delegations/TWN/2022)
- Public headline says "Human Engineer @ Cognition | MIT EECS | IOI Gold Medalist". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Codeforces handle balbit: International Grandmaster, current rating 2715, max 2812, organization MIT, country Taiwan. (https://codeforces.com/profile/balbit)
- MIT CSAIL student researcher (Oct 2022-May 2023) in Samuel Madden's group, supervised by Darryl Ho: proved bounds for optimal subsequence dynamic time warping and built a phonetic fuzzy-search demo for misheard lyrics. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Competed in USACO as a Taiwan pre-college participant (class of 2022), scoring a perfect 1000 in the January 2022 Platinum contest. (https://usaco.org/current/data/jan22_platinum_results.html)
- IOI 2021 (Taiwan): Silver, 347 points, rank 38/351. (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/7616)
- IOI 2021 Taiwan teammates: Ping-Hsuan Lin (Gold), Chen-Kai Chang (Silver), Hsin-Wei Hou (Silver); Hsin-Wei Hou was his teammate on both IOI teams. (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/delegations/TWN/2021)
- 2022 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI)  Gold Medalist.
2021 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) Silver Medalist
2021 Asia Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO) Gold Medalist
Programming, problem solving, and poetry enthusiast; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Open source on GitHub (balbit): TreeHacks2024 (autonomous AI drone system for power-line anomaly inspection), camel-tutor (adds interactive OCaml editors to Real World OCaml), Bookworm, LeiserShoot/Leiser.io (multiplayer game inspired by MIT's Leiserchess), HackTech2025, AutoBrowser, and a fork of mit-han-lab/TinyChatEngine. (https://github.com/balbit)
- Retweeted Scott Wu's denial verbatim: 'This is not true. Huge respect for the SpaceX team but Cognition is not for sale and we haven't been talking.' (https://x.com/elliotliu123/status/2090217951580618902)
- While interning at Pika he built 'pikavote' (TypeScript), described as 'Vote on pika videos'. (https://github.com/balbit?tab=repositories)
- Hackathon trail (TreeHacks 2024, HackTech 2025) plus Leiserchess and OCaml repos (MIT 6.106/6.1010-style coursework) sketches a builder who ships quick end-to-end prototypes, the profile Cognition hires for. (https://github.com/balbit?tab=repositories)
- Before college: NTU student research assistant (Sep 2020-Mar 2021) on predicting institutional-investor behavior with algorithms, presented at the Young Turing Program; AutoQuant project intern in Taipei (summer 2021) who built a 'scout app' for its fintech algorithm. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Previous roles include Research Intern at Pika; Data Platform Intern at Stripe; UROP at MIT CSAIL; Machine Learning Intern at Genesis Therapeutics; Student Researcher at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Deep Learning Intern at MediaTek Research; Project Intern at AutoQuant; Student Research Assistant at National Taiwan University. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Listed on Next Play's High Potential Index as 'Elliot Liu, Cognition, Human Engineer' with Stripe, Genesis Therapeutics and MIT as background. (https://nextplay.so/high-potential-index)
- His LinkedIn summary also lists APIO 2021 Gold and calls him a 'Programming, problem solving, and poetry enthusiast'. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)
- Location is Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217)

## Experience
- Human Engineer at Cognition (Jun 2025 - Present)
- Research Intern at Pika - Palo Alto, California, United States (Jan 2025 - Feb 2025)
- Data Platform Intern at Stripe - South San Francisco, California, United States (Jun 2024 - Aug 2024)
- UROP at MIT CSAIL - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Apr 2024 - May 2024): ･ UROP researcher with Yoon Kim, working on speeding up LLM inference
･ Working on speeding up batched mat-muls with vector database-based quantization + LoRA
- Machine Learning Intern at Genesis Therapeutics - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2023 - Aug 2023)
- Student Researcher at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Oct 2022 - May 2023): ･ UROP researcher under Samuel Madden, directly supervised by Darryl Ho
･ Proved time complexity bounds on optimal subsequence dynamic time warping
･ Improving chunk-DTW lower bounds and computation speed for faster time series categorizing via the k-nearest neighbors algorithm
･ Created a demo using the subsequence DTW algorithm to create a text-to-text fuzzy search tool based on phonetic similarity to fix misheard lyrics
- Deep Learning Intern at MediaTek Research - Taipei, Taipei City, Taiwan (Jan 2023 - Jan 2023)
- Project Intern at AutoQuant - Taipei City, Taiwan (Jun 2021 - Aug 2021): Created a "scout app" to convert the core fintech algorithm into a marketable product
- Student Research Assistant at National Taiwan University - Taipei City, Taiwan (Sep 2020 - Mar 2021): Participated in a 6-month research project with NTU professors on Using Algorithms to Predict Institutional Investor Behaviors In the Stock Market
Presented research for the Young Turing Program in March 2021

## Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - B.S. - (May 2022 - May 2025)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-en-yi-liu-319050217
- https://codeforces.com/api/user.info?handles=balbit
- https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/7616
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI
- https://x.com/elliotliu123
- https://stats.ioinformatics.org/delegations/TWN/2021
- https://github.com/balbit?tab=repositories
- https://usaco.org/current/data/jan22_platinum_results.html
- https://nextplay.so/high-potential-index
- https://stats.ioinformatics.org/delegations/TWN/2022
- https://github.com/balbit
- https://x.com/elliotliu123/status/2110821170966925578
- https://x.com/elliotliu123/status/2077173027855634567
- https://codeforces.com/profile/balbit
- https://x.com/elliotliu123/status/2090217951580618902


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