# Jonathan Kelley

![Jonathan Kelley](/resources/cognition/portraits/jonathan-kelley.webp)

MTS @ Cognition | Founder Dioxus s23 (acq)  
Cognition  
San Francisco, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: May 2023
- How they joined: With Dioxus Labs (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/dioxus)
- Before Dioxus Labs: Systems Engineer, Cloudflare

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley
- X: @jkelleyrtp
- GitHub: https://github.com/jkelleyrtp
- Website: https://jonathan-kelley.com
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Three days after the acquisition post he tied it to Devin getting a Mac, verbatim: "I hope it's now obvious why Cognition acquired my company Dioxus Labs 😁 There's a reason nobody had this - it's really fckn hard. We rebuilt storage, networking, VNC, and CUA from scratch - in Rust! Super proud to be working alongside the great minds of Cognition and Dioxus Labs". (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_special-delivery-devin-just-got-a-mac-activity-7505682198700802048-wAUf?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4)
- On his team's work inside Cognition, verbatim: "the @dioxuslabs team has been cooking up some crazy vm magic at @cognition ... whatever you think of the cloud agent experience today... tomorrow will be much different.". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2106102817673060602)
- Verbatim: "@DevinAI tirelessly decompiled Star Wars Rogue Squadron: my favorite childhood game... Now I get to fly x-wings at work to stress test Devin's new 60fps QUIC based VNC". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105802038110261478)
- Teases Cognition's next move after rivals ship macOS cloud agents, quoting: "everybody shipping macOS cloud agents 😎 guess what we're doing next.". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2115965089782317438)
- Public praise of Devin Desktop, verbatim: "Devin Desktop is like really really good now! Kudos to the team who worked on it. No other ADEs come even close to what DD can do Remote terminal, remote editor, cloud and native hybrid, all the OSes. Bringing Google-level remote dev to everyone". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2113678639380467814)
- Describes his own Cognition workflow, verbatim: "i've been fanning out the rustd work into several sub-devins and my mind is being blown several different ways at once" - he runs a project called rustd by parallelizing work across multiple Devin instances. (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2110999997810720943)
- Announced an unreleased project to speed up Rust builds ~10x, verbatim: "I found a way to speed up Rust builds by 10x... the project isn't ready just yet but I have some early numbers to share"; ideas include dissolving crates as the compile unit and per-function codegen caching, extending his Dioxus subsecond hot-patching work into compiler tooling. (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2110433801071689733)
- Reacting to the ChatGPT-subscription-in-Devin launch, verbatim: "ripping cloud gpt agents on a subscription is too much fun". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2108783542197174517)
- Worldview on AI and games, verbatim: "I think the use of AI for building games will lead to a renaissance of gaming and the industry... Indie teams will outship AAA as creativity booms". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105421153930203513)
- Pitched Devin's breadth, verbatim: "Imagine: macos, ios, windows, linux, android, scans, devboxes, full vms, browser apps, and so much more... all with your existing ChatGPT subscription. 🥹 devin is shaping up to be the best place to build ambitious software". (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105013858398265843)
- Public headline says "MTS @ Cognition | Founder Dioxus s23 (acq)". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)
- Authored the Dioxus 0.7 release post (Sep 8, 2025) shipping Subsecond Rust hot-patching, a native renderer, bundle splitting and Radix-UI style components, framed around making "high level Rust" suitable for rapid development; Subsecond is also integrated into Bevy. (https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/release-070/)
- Guest on the Rustacean Station podcast (host Allen Wyma, published 2025-06-28) covering Dioxus' origin and core technology, hot reloading, the road to a stable 1.0, full-stack/native API vision, and collaboration across the Rust UI ecosystem. (https://rustacean-station.org/episode/jonathan-kelley/)
- Co-founded LEAF Systems (spatial intelligence for manufacturing inventory) as CTO/Founder alongside Julia Wang (CEO/Founder) and Abhijit Gupta (Developer/Founder, an NCSSM robotics captain), linking his Olin and NCSSM networks in his first startup. (https://leafsystems.io/)
- Public headline says "MTS @ Cognition | Founder Dioxus s23 (acq)". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)
- His X following is dense with Cognition leadership and staff (Scott Wu, Russell Kaplan, Walden Yan, Jeffrey Ling) plus sandbox/computer-use founders (e2b, trycua, Tensorlake) and Rust tooling peers (Charlie Marsh). (https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/following)
- A systems engineer and startup founder passionate about solving deeply challenging problems. Prolific open source contributor (35k ⭐️ on GitHub) and entrepreneur (raised $3.4m from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, and more). Currently building skyvm.dev at dioxus.dev; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)
- Gave a Bay Area Rust meetup talk about Dioxus and SkyVM on Feb 18, 2026, promoting SkyVM publicly a month after its launch. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_a-new-rust-meetup-group-is-formingin-activity-7426699518097727488-cQok?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4)
- LEAF Systems (Jonathan Kelley and Julia Wang) was named an undergraduate-team finalist for the 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, listed under MIT and Olin College. (https://lemelson.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2021-08/Student_Prize_Finalists_8_13_21.pdf)
- As an NCSSM junior he and teammate Madeline Paoletti built a NASA HUNCH program project, a device to partner with the 3D printer aboard the ISS, advised by chemistry teacher Myra Halpin, and held videoconferences with NASA and Made In Space engineers. (https://www.ncssm.edu/news/student-engineers-aim-for-space-station)
- A systems engineer and startup founder passionate about solving deeply challenging problems. Prolific open source contributor (35k ⭐️ on GitHub) and entrepreneur (raised $3.4m from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, and more). Currently building skyvm.dev at dioxus.dev; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)
- His personal site lists him as previously a Hardware Intern at NASA Langley Research Center and a Fullstack Engineer at HASH.ai before Cloudflare. (https://jonathan-kelley.com)
- Took LEAF Systems through Babson College's 2021 Summer Catalyst accelerator, listed as "LEAF Systems - Jonathan Kelley Olin '22". (https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/2021-summer-catalyst/)
- Presented 'Electron Trapping for Small Scale Nuclear Fusion' at the 2018 Sigma Xi Student Research Showcase for NCSSM. (https://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings-events/past-events/past-annual-meetings/2018/student-research-showcase/presentation-sections/physics-astronomy)
- Location is San Francisco, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)
- Location is San Francisco, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition - San Francisco, California, United States (Jun 2026 - Present): Building Devin, the leading AI cloud coding agent.
- Founder / CEO at Dioxus Labs - San Francisco, California, United States (May 2023 - Jun 2026): Acquired by Cognition 🎉 - Dioxus is an open source app framework for building web, desktop, and mobile apps in Rust.

Raised $3.4 million from YC and Khosla Ventures. Over 40k Github stars, 3m+ downloads, keynote speaker at Rust Conf 2025. Used by companies like Airbus, Huawei, System76, GitHub, Cognition, Perplexity, the ESA, and others.
- Systems Engineer at Cloudflare - San Francisco, California, United States (Jun 2022 - May 2023): Systems Engineer on the Zero Trust team, working on https://1.1.1.1.

Building WARP, a next generation enterprise tunnel app competing with ZScaler and Tailscale.

Working with Rust and WireGuard.
- Platform Engineer at HASH (Sep 2019 - Jan 2021): Building out HASH's next generation simulation tool powered by TypeScript, Rust, and WebAssembly with a focus on parallel distributed computing.

Our product, HASH Core, is a venture-backed next-generation simulation tool that enables businesses to make data-driven decisions through large-scale agent based modeling.
- Cofounder at LEAF Systems - Boston, Massachusetts (Apr 2018 - Aug 2019): Spatial intelligence platform for inventory mismanagement in manufacturing, healthcare, and defense. Developed real-time low-cost ultrawideband asset tracking tags and software. 

Finalist for MIT’s Lemelson Student Prize, 100K Pitch, 100K Accelerate, and Fuse competitions. Winner of the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge. Raised seed round from Boston VCs.
• Designed and fabricated custom quadrupole trap for high energy electrons
• Modeled and characterized the behavior of electron plasma using hardware-accelerated Python and OpenCL
- NASA HUNCH Internship at NASA Langley Research Center (Sep 2016 - Jun 2018): Worked at NASA Langley alongside engineers and researchers to develop a zero-gravity injection molding system and ultrawideband-based asset tracking solution for the International Space Station.

## Education
- Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering - Bachelor's degree, Systems Engineering - (Jan 2018 - Jan 2022)
- Y Combinator - YC S23 - (May 2023 - Aug 2023)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-r-kelley?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAACSI-mIBwdOzzLYd9WCozr7UEygNve2gWZY
- https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/release-070/
- https://leafsystems.io/
- https://www.ncssm.edu/news/student-engineers-aim-for-space-station
- https://github.com/jkelleyrtp
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp
- https://lemelson.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2021-08/Student_Prize_Finalists_8_13_21.pdf
- https://entrepreneurship.babson.edu/2021-summer-catalyst/
- https://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings-events/past-events/past-annual-meetings/2018/student-research-showcase/presentation-sections/physics-astronomy
- https://jonathan-kelley.com
- https://x.com/kylifec
- https://rustacean-station.org/episode/jonathan-kelley/
- https://cognition.com/blog/welcoming-dioxus
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_special-delivery-devin-just-got-a-mac-activity-7505682198700802048-wAUf?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_my-companydioxus-labs-has-been-acquired-activity-7504367055790493696-lUEF?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2106102817673060602
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105802038110261478
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_were-launching-something-new-when-we-went-activity-7419525489071144960-QoiN?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2106116416709755103
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2115965089782317438
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2115617597542867050
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2113678639380467814
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2110999997810720943
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2110433801071689733
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2108783542197174517
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105421153930203513
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2105013858398265843
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/status/2117713106894012538
- https://x.com/jkelleyrtp/following
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-r-kelley_a-new-rust-meetup-group-is-formingin-activity-7426699518097727488-cQok?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCglqQBezSDqiTB_rli_hX4G4fX5DFDhW4


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