# Maggie Cisneros

Co-Founder of Golden Geese Recruiting; ex-Cognition/Windsurf Deployed Engineer leader and Strategic AE  
Golden Geese Recruiting  
Austin, Texas, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Former Strategic Account Executive - Insurance (Sales/GTM)
- Joined: May 2024
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Senior Field Engineer - OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing & Continuous Profiling, Grafana Labs
- Now: Golden Geese Recruiting (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Grafana Labs; Amazon (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz
- GitHub: https://github.com/Mkrummz

## Notes
- In October 2026 she left Cognition to co-found Golden Geese Recruiting with Paxton Duff (CEO) as Co-Founder & Managing Partner; the firm places Forward Deployed Engineers at AI companies and advises pre-seed to Series C startups on structuring customer engineering teams. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkrummz_im-excited-to-share-that-im-joining-paxton-activity-7513703507447820289-ipqr)
- Co-founder Paxton Duff wrote that as a DE leader she 'interviewed more than 1,000 candidates', a hiring track record that directly underpins her move into FDE recruiting. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paxton-duff-b7b499134_could-not-think-more-highly-of-maggie-cisneros-activity-7513705163153408000-1y7p)
- Her departure post on working at Cognition, verbatim: "Of course, starting something new also means closing a chapter that's meant an incredible amount to me. My confidence in Cognition's future has never been higher. I'm incredibly grateful for the people, the experiences, and the opportunity to build alongside such an exceptional team." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkrummz_im-excited-to-share-that-im-joining-paxton-activity-7513703507447820289-ipqr)
- Moved from engineering to sales as Strategic Account Executive at Cognition (Aug 2025-Feb 2026; per The Org, the Insurance vertical); profile states she closed $2.2M+ in ARR and handed off a $1.7M upsell that closed the same quarter plus two accounts in active evaluation. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- As Deployed Engineer Leader, East and EMEA (Nov 2024-Aug 2025), she partnered with a fellow DE manager to scale the Deployed Engineering team from 2 to 30 and made Presidents Club FY25. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Joined Windsurf (then Codeium, later acquired by Cognition) in May 2024 as its 2nd Deployed Engineer and the company's first technical hire outside the Bay Area, working from Austin; she rode the acquisition into Cognition. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- She summarizes her path verbatim as: "From AWS to Grafana to Windsurf to Cognition, I've been fortunate to wear a lot of different hats: SWE, Solution Architect, Solution Engineer, Deployed Engineer, DE leader, and Strategic AE." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkrummz_im-excited-to-share-that-im-joining-paxton-activity-7513703507447820289-ipqr)
- From Feb to Oct 2026 she held a Special Projects role at Cognition 'reporting to the President and working on initiatives across product, operations, enablement, marketing, and sales'; Paxton Duff describes it as spearheading special projects for Cognition's president. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Two months after joining Windsurf, she created an update-readme-dependencies branch on Exafunction/codeium.el (the Codeium Emacs plugin) on 2024-07-16, adding a libxml2 dependency note, her open source footprint on the acquired company's product. (https://github.com/Exafunction/codeium.el/activity)
- Promoted at Grafana Labs to Senior Field Engineer focused on OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing and continuous profiling (2023-2024), building demos, workshops and technical content for the SE organization. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- At Grafana Labs she was a Solutions Engineer (Feb 2022-Feb 2023) and made Presidents Club FY23, Central SE of the year and Global rookie of the year, ranking #6 of 55+ SEs globally for new logos; she was also the second LATAM Solutions Engineer at the company. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Public headline says "FDE Recruiting & Advising | ex-Cognition AI, Grafana Labs, AWS | former FDE & FDE leader". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Pushed a series of commits to the SLO-Sloth-Workshop branch of grafana/slo-workshop-breakouts on 2024-04-09 (Breakout_2_SLO_Creation_using_Sloth.md, complete_slo.yml), workshop content for teaching SLOs with Sloth. (https://github.com/grafana/slo-workshop-breakouts/activity)
- Opened grafana/tempo issue #2370 on 2023-04-26 asking for a clearer TraceQL error when querying pre-Tempo-2.0 blocks, which return 'query error upstream: (500) Unsupported' after the Parquet format change; field feedback from her tracing work. (https://github.com/grafana/tempo/issues/2370)
- Solutions Architect at AWS from 2019 to 2022 (Associate SA, then SA II), building cloud-native data processing proof-of-concepts and reusable infrastructure-as-code templates. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Earned a B.S. in Computer Science from St. Norbert College (2015-2019) and studied abroad at the University of Limerick. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Started at Humana as an Application Developer (2017) and then a Big Data & Analytics Data Engineer in Louisville (2017-2019). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Previous roles include Special Projects at Cognition; Strategic Account Executive at Cognition; Deployed Engineer Leader, East and EMEA @ Windsurf [Acquired Company] at Cognition; 2nd Deployed Engineer @ Windsurf [Acquired Company] at Cognition; Senior Field Engineer - OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing & Continuous Profiling at Grafana Labs; Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs; Solutions Architect II at Amazon Web Services (AWS); Associate Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Education history includes Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, St. Norbert College; Study Abroad Program, University of Limerick. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)
- Contributor to grafana/aws-workshop; release notes credit '@Mkrummz made their first contribution in #4'. (https://github.com/grafana/AWS_Workshop/releases)
- The departure post drew about 190 reactions and 44 comments, strong engagement for a sales/FDE operator. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkrummz_im-excited-to-share-that-im-joining-paxton-activity-7513703507447820289-ipqr)
- Paxton Duff calls her 'the ultimate customer advocate' and notes she is (allegedly) good at padel. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paxton-duff-b7b499134_could-not-think-more-highly-of-maggie-cisneros-activity-7513705163153408000-1y7p)
- Location is Austin, Texas, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz)

## Experience
- Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Golden Geese Recruiting - Austin, Texas, United States (Oct 2026 - Present): We recruit FDEs (forward-deployed engineers) for elite AI companies and advise early-stage startups as they build their customer engineering orgs. 

We provide a white-glove, hands-on approach for our clients and FDE candidates, rooted in our background as operators at Cognition, Windsurf, Grafana, MongoDB, AWS, etc. 

If you are a potential candidate or partner company, contact us via DM or on our website below.
- Special Projects at Cognition - Austin, Texas, United States (Feb 2026 - Oct 2026): Reporting to the President and working on initiatives across product, operations, enablement, marketing, and sales.
- Strategic Account Executive at Cognition - Austin, Texas, United States (Aug 2025 - Feb 2026): Closed $2.2M+ in ARR through customer expansion and acquisition

During my transition back to the technical side, I handed off a $1.7M upsell that closed that the same quarter as well as another 2 accounts in active evaluations with executive alignment.
- Deployed Engineer Leader, East and EMEA @ Windsurf [Acquired Company] at Cognition - Austin, Texas, United States (Nov 2024 - Aug 2025): 2nd Deployed Engineer (DE) at the company; first technical hire outside the Bay Area

Partnered with fellow DE Manager to scale the DE team from 2 to 30

Presidents Club FY25
- 2nd Deployed Engineer @ Windsurf [Acquired Company] at Cognition - Austin, Texas, United States (May 2024 - Nov 2024)
- Senior Field Engineer - OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing & Continuous Profiling at Grafana Labs - Austin, Texas, United States (Feb 2023 - May 2024): Presidents Club FY24

Customer facing technical subject matter expert for distributed tracing and continuous profiling 

Accelerate, scale, and enhance the route to technical wins by supporting the field through comprehensive technical meetings, significant strategic POV's, blogs, webinars, and more

Design, create, and present technical presentations, whitepapers, product demonstrations, and workshops for Solution Engineers to deliver to prospects, customers, and the community

Collaborate across departments, frequently partnering with Product Management, Technical Writers, Marketing, Engineering, and Customer Experience teams to ensure customer feedback is heard and acted upon
- Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs - Austin, Texas, United States (Feb 2022 - Feb 2023): Presidents Club FY23

In FY 23, across >55 SEs globally was #6 for new logos signed and #7 for new revenue obtained. For the 10 SEs in the central region was #1 for new revenue.

Central SE of the year (by $$ and %), Global rookie of the year

Closed the biggest deal of the quarter in the central region as the lead Solutions Engineer (Q2 + Q4).

Created the winning demo amongst all solutions engineers globally on how to best position a recently acquired software, this led to the entire solutions engineer organization being better equipped to present and articulate the value of the product.

Designed various workflows/architectures to enable the extraction and analysis of data both in person sessions and virtually resulting in greater adoption of our products.

Lead multiple successful proofs of values resulting in technical wins.

Presented on stage at multiple Grafana speaking engagements to over 70 people at a time, as well as prepared the technical content and demo that was to be used globally.

Second LATAM Solutions Engineer in the company, working to enable and bring a stronger presence in the region both in terms of partner relationships and customer base.
- Solutions Architect II at Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Austin, Texas, United States (Apr 2021 - Feb 2022): Created proof of concept demonstrating a cloud native architecture approach for data processing and ingestion, resulting in a significant reduction ongoing maintenance and cost for the customer
 
Aided in the development of a reusable template (infrastructure as code) for an existing solution, helping with the initial design, scripting, testing, and locking down of identity and access, resulting in the elimination the 20-40 minutes setup time, turning it into a one click deployment

Cleared customer blockers by diving deep into various domains such as machine learning, compute, analytics, call centers, end user compute, and media services resulting in the multiple external AWS documents being updated as well as the continuation of their development on the AWS platform

Led over a dozen technical training and hands on lab sessions to deepen customer’s technical understanding and foster creativity in domains such as security, call- centers, containers, machine learning, databases, networking, and compute 

Developed internal training document around backups in AWS to help eliminate redundant questions from incoming team members and ensure they were properly ramped up before taking calls
- Associate Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Herndon, Virginia, United States (Jul 2019 - Apr 2021)
- Data Engineer | Big Data & Analytics at Humana - Louisville, Kentucky, United States (Aug 2017 - May 2019)
- Application Developer at Humana - Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States (May 2017 - Aug 2017)

## Education
- St. Norbert College - Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science - (Sep 2015 - May 2019): Double Major: Economics and Computer Science
- University of Limerick - Study Abroad Program

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkrummz?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAB8fBmcBNxGqWS-b6-VFoAb3UJlGAcsD2B8
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paxton-duff-b7b499134_could-not-think-more-highly-of-maggie-cisneros-activity-7513705163153408000-1y7p
- https://github.com/grafana/tempo/issues/2370
- https://github.com/grafana/slo-workshop-breakouts/activity
- https://github.com/grafana/AWS_Workshop/releases
- https://github.com/Exafunction/codeium.el/activity
- https://github.com/Mkrummz
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs/posts
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefflinwang?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAIU70ABoq4f17O2Fls4IOq5yGVjaa1us0c
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkrummz_im-excited-to-share-that-im-joining-paxton-activity-7513703507447820289-ipqr


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