# Jacob Teo

![Jacob Teo](/resources/cognition/portraits/jacob-teo.webp)

Research engineer at Cognition; first author of SWE-1.5, co-author of SWE-1.7; IOI gold medallist and ICPC World Finalist  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Research & Engineering (Engineering)
- Joined: Jan 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Quantitative Research Intern, Jump Trading Group
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: MIT; Jump Trading (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

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

## Notes
- Credited as a co-author of SWE-1.7 ('Frontier Intelligence at a Fraction of the Cost') alongside Ray Wang, Gary Chang, Steven Cao and Silas Alberti (equal-contribution byline); SWE-1.7 targets longer-horizon asynchronous tasks. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7)
- Listed first in the author byline of Cognition's 'Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model' (with Nikhil Jha and others), a frontier-size coding model served via Cerebras at up to 950 tok/s and launched in Windsurf; trained with end-to-end RL on the Cascade agent harness and beta-tested as 'Falcon Alpha'. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5)
- Gave the talk 'Cognition's DeepWiki' at the LangChain SF meetup on LLM wikis and agent memory (co-billed with LangChain's Brace Sproul), covering DeepWiki's move from an orchestrated v1 to an agentic v2, wiki-quality metrics and four context-engineering principles; DeepWiki grew from Devin context to 1.4M indexed repos. (https://www.dutchstartup.ai/en/tv/inside-deepwiki-how-cognition-builds-wikis-for-devin-at-scale)
- On SWE-1.5 launch he posted: "The best way to make coding agents interactive is to just make them run faster than you can think. We're already hitting internal PMF with SWE-1.5, and this is only the beginning!" (via Techmeme, which carried the post). (https://www.techmeme.com/251030/p37)
- Works on Research & Engineering at Cognition since January 2025 per LinkedIn ('Building Devin'); he joined about six months before Cognition agreed to acquire Windsurf (July 2025). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- MIT ICPC team 'Taxi' with Siyong Huang and Thomas Guo placed 18th at the ICPC 2023 World Finals (7/11 solved, held April 2024); the same trio competed at NAC 2022 as 'mit' and at the 2023 EC-Final as 'mit taxi'. (https://cphof.org/profile/codeforces:jacobtpl)
- IOI record for Singapore (as Jacob Teo Por Loong / jacobtpl): Silver at IOI 2015 (rank 37), Gold at IOI 2016 (rank 11), Silver at IOI 2018 (rank 42). (https://cphof.org/profile/codeforces:jacobtpl)
- Promoted the talk on X: "excited to share about how we built DeepWiki at @cognition, and chat with @BraceSproul about the future of agent context and memory!" (https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2080343810987757608)
- On the SWE-1.7 launch day he posted on X: "Our best model so far and much more to come :) Excited for everyone to try it in Devin!" (https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2074888183964377448)
- Before Cognition, interned at Anysphere (Cursor) in January 2024, fine-tuning new models for Cursor Tab - early hands-on work on code-completion models two years before SWE-1.5. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Jump Trading: Quantitative Trading Intern (Chicago, summer 2023) working on US equity microstructure, execution algorithms and HFT models, and winner of the Jump Global Quant Trading Competition Challenge; returned summer 2024 as Quantitative Research Intern doing alpha research on HF equities and mid-frequency options and building an options trade simulator. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Research Science Institute 2017 researcher under Prof. Jelani Nelson (Harvard) on succinct data structures, producing arXiv:1709.09574 'Fillable arrays with constant time operations and a single bit of redundancy' with Jelani Nelson and Huacheng Yu. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.09574)
- Listed as J. Teo among authors of Cognition's FrontierCode 1.1 benchmark post (with E. Lu, B. Pan, R. Wang, S. Alberti and others). (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7)
- As 'Milk Tea' (Siyong Huang, Jacob Teo, Thomas Guo) MIT won Silver plus first-to-solve awards on problems A, B, D, J and K at the 2024-25 ICPC Northeast North America regional. (https://ne.na.icpc.global/hall-of-fame/)
- IOI 2018 (Tsukuba, Japan) Team Singapore: Gabriel Goh (gold), Jacob Teo (silver), Jeffrey Lee, Teow Hua Jun; led by Dr Steven Halim (NUS School of Computing) and Dr Daren Ler (MOE). (https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/news/2018-ioi/)
- IOI 2016 Singapore team (Kazan): Jacob Teo Por Loong (gold), Clarence Chew Xuan Da (silver), Pang Wen Yuen (silver), Zhang Guangxuan (bronze). (https://www.innovationmagazine.com/volumes/v16n1/schoolssection2.html)
- Public headline says "Cognition | CS @ MIT". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Publicly welcomed new Cognition hires including Jared Palmer (tagging Scott Wu) and Katie Cheng/Jared Z joining Silas Alberti's group. (https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2115167197727506544)
- Open source on GitHub (jacobtpl): forks icpc-ref (ICPC reference based on KACTL, updated Oct 2026), flash-attention fork (CUDA, Dec 2024), DevinPool (Swift, Sep 2026), pokerbots (C++, MIT Pokerbots 2022), ctf; small footprint since most work is internal. (https://github.com/jacobtpl)
- Recalled Cognition's hacker-house era: "seeing all the old house photos really brings me back. lots of fun memories and late night gym sessions... wish I took more pictures but all I have is us trying to recreate the cognition logo with dumbbells" (https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2054079068182921319)
- Emerald Innovations (Dina Katabi's MIT spinout) software engineer intern, summer 2022: algorithms for human location tracking through radio signals and removing interference from noisy data. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Served on the IOI 2021 (Singapore) committees alongside Prof. Sung Wing Kin Ken, Gan Wei Liang, Ling Yan Hao, Benson Lin and Melvin Zhang - a give-back to Singapore's olympiad training pipeline. (https://ioi2021.sg/committees/)
- ICPC teammate Thomas Guo was also at Jump Trading (Quant Trader/Researcher) in summer 2024, overlapping Jacob's second Jump stint. (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/thomas-guo-923374213)
- AlphaLab Capital (Singapore) intern Dec 2020-Jun 2021: infrastructure to trade on blockchain automated market makers and mid-frequency crypto quant research. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Previous roles include Quantitative Research Intern at Jump Trading Group; Software Engineer Intern at Anysphere; Quantitative Trading Intern at Jump Trading LLC; Software Engineer Intern at Emerald Innovations; Software Engineer Intern at AlphaLab Capital; Quartermaster, 48th Battalion, Singapore Armoured Regiment at Singapore Armed Forces (SAF); Software Engineer Intern at Sea; Researcher at Research Science Institute (RSI). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Taught at MIT ESP Splash 2021 a class on trading/stock markets/crypto with Stanley Wang, Alicia Xia and Daniel Xu. (https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2021/catalog)
- Served as Quartermaster, 48th Battalion Singapore Armoured Regiment during national service (Dec 2019-Nov 2020) before starting MIT in 2021. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl)

## Experience
- Research & Engineering at Cognition - San Francisco Bay Area (Jan 2025 - Present): Building Devin
- Quantitative Research Intern at Jump Trading Group - Chicago, Illinois, United States (Jun 2024 - Aug 2024): - Alpha research on high-frequency equities and mid-frequency options
- Built an options trade simulator and a performant regression pipeline
- Software Engineer Intern at Anysphere - San Francisco, California, United States (Jan 2024 - Jan 2024): - Building Cursor
- Fine-tuning new models for Cursor Tab
- Quantitative Trading Intern at Jump Trading LLC - Chicago, Illinois, United States (Jun 2023 - Aug 2023): - Training on simulated trading, predictive modeling and execution strategies
- Projects on US equity market microstructure, execution algorithms and models for high-frequency trading.
- Winner of the Jump Global Quant Trading Competition Challenge.
- Software Engineer Intern at Emerald Innovations - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (May 2022 - Aug 2022): - Developed a new and improved algorithm for human location tracking through radio signals
- Researched on removal of signal interference from noisy raw data
- Software Engineer Intern at AlphaLab Capital - Singapore (Dec 2020 - Jun 2021): - Analyzed price mechanisms of and developed infrastructure to trade on automated market makers on the blockchain
- Researched strategies for mid-frequency cryptocurrency quantitative trading
- Quartermaster, 48th Battalion, Singapore Armoured Regiment at Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) - Singapore (Dec 2019 - Nov 2020)
- Software Engineer Intern at Sea - Singapore (May 2018 - Jul 2018): Added features to a talent pool portal used for company HR operations
- Researcher at Research Science Institute (RSI) - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Jun 2017 - Aug 2017): Researched on succinct data structures under the mentorship of Professor Jelani Nelson, Harvard University.

## Education
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science - (Jan 2021 - Jan 2025): TA for 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems
- National University of Singapore - Non-Graduating - (Aug 2015 - May 2018): Classes Taken:
• CS5330 Randomised Algorithms
• CS3244 Machine Learning
• CS2100 Computer Organisation
• CS2102 Database Systems
• CS2106 Operating Systems
• MA1101R Linear Algebra
Top Academic Student 2013 - 2018

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobtpl
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7
- https://cphof.org/profile/codeforces:jacobtpl
- https://www.dutchstartup.ai/en/tv/inside-deepwiki-how-cognition-builds-wikis-for-devin-at-scale
- https://www.techmeme.com/251030/p37
- https://github.com/jacobtpl
- https://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2021/catalog
- https://ioi2021.sg/committees/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.09574
- https://ca.linkedin.com/in/thomas-guo-923374213
- https://www.innovationmagazine.com/volumes/v16n1/schoolssection2.html
- https://chessabc.com/player/teo-por-loong-jacob
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2085614333636255870
- https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/news/2018-ioi/
- https://ne.na.icpc.global/hall-of-fame/
- https://x.com/jacobtpl
- https://api.github.com/users/jacobtpl/repos?per_page=100
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Im0l_vwqM
- https://www.eventmatch.co/en/events/langchain-sf-meetup-llm-wikis-and-giving-your-agents-memory-20260728
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2098152157711421551
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2080343810987757608
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2074888183964377448
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2087961858481533368
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2115167197727506544
- https://x.com/jacobtpl/status/2054079068182921319


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