# Matthew Vanderwerf

![Matthew Vanderwerf](/resources/cognition/portraits/matthew-vanderwerf.webp)

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (ex-Windsurf/Codeium production engineer, ex-Nuro)  
Cognition  
Redwood City, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Sep 2024
- How they joined: With Windsurf (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/windsurf)
- Before Windsurf: Software Infrastructure Engineer, Volley Automation
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Codeium (Windsurf); Nuro (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52
- GitHub: https://github.com/matthewwerf
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf (formerly Codeium) in July 2025, days after Google DeepMind hired Windsurf's CEO and research leaders; Vanderwerf was on Windsurf's staff at the time. (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf/)
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (maker of Devin and, since July 2025, Windsurf) from July 2025; the start date coincides with Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- On Windsurf launch day he posted on LinkedIn: "Today we are launching our own IDE, Windsurf, powered by a new way of working with AI, which we have called Cascade. I use Cascade all the time to make changes across all our production code, whether it's Kubernetes resources, helm charts, Terraform, or any of the supporting tooling and scripts. Here's a quick example of Cascade making a script to check Kubernetes pods near arbitrary resource limits across a cluster. Check out Windsurf for yourself at windsurf.ai" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52_windsurf-activity-7262579356345016320-0_Qn)
- Joined Codeium/Windsurf as a Production Engineer in September 2024, about two months before the Windsurf IDE launch. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- His launch post shows that by November 2024 his day-to-day at Codeium covered production infrastructure (Kubernetes resources, Helm charts, Terraform and supporting scripts), and that he dogfooded Cascade, the agentic feature, on that infra code. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52_windsurf-activity-7262579356345016320-0_Qn)
- Robotics Reliability Engineer at Nuro (Mar 2020 - Nov 2022): he owned, developed and maintained the Secure Bot Network, which provided HA secure VPN connections to Nuro's whole fleet (Prii and robots) for remote monitoring, telemetry log upload, disk-decryption key distribution and mTLS gRPC remote command. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Software Infrastructure Engineer at Volley Automation (Sep 2023 - Aug 2024), where he re-architected the on-prem central compute cluster onto OnLogic rugged industrial servers, provisioned via Ansible and Terraform. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- At Nuro he helped bring up the P2/R3 platform and built a hot-plug external-modem load-balancing fix, which let the platform test on open roads while waiting on vendor firmware patches. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Public headline says "Member of Technical Staff at Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- At Volley Automation he built AWS infrastructure for a 24/7 livestream of the company's production garage in downtown San Francisco and wrote Ansible/Kubernetes code to configure its autonomous EV charging infrastructure. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Software Engineer on Spreetail's DevOps Chapter (Jun 2019 - Mar 2020), working with Elasticsearch, Packer, Terraform, Prometheus, HAProxy/Nginx and Okta/Vouch-Proxy SSO. Before that he was a DevOps intern there (May 2018 - May 2019) on Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, Helm, Chef and GitLab-CI. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- B.S. in Software Engineering from Iowa State University (2015-2019), magna cum laude (3.75/4.0), with a minor in Cyber Security. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- GitHub.com/matthewwerf.

No Third-Party Recruiters - No Salespeople; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Technology Development Intern (DevOps) at UnitedHealth Group in summer 2017, building Go REST APIs on Docker, AWS and OpenShift (OSE3). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Previous roles include Software Infrastructure Engineer at Volley Automation; Robotics Reliability Engineer at Nuro; Software Engineer at Spreetail; Software Development Intern at Spreetail; Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University; Technology Development Intern - DevOps at UnitedHealth Group. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Served as an undergraduate TA at Iowa State four times: CprE 185 Intro to Problem Solving in C (with Daniel Roggow, then Dr. Swamy Ponpandi), SE 339 Software Architecture and Design (Dr. Lotfi Ben-Othmane) and ComS 362 Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (Robert Ward). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Earlier part-time work: bot developer at Sodima Solutions (Feb-May 2017, Python/MongoDB) and backend Node.js developer at Flyer, LLC (Jan-Mar 2016). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Public gists include a Packer buildfile and a verbose PACKER_LOG=1 crash log. (https://github.com/matthewwerf)
- Location is Redwood City, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- His LinkedIn About section consists only of a link to GitHub.com/matthewwerf and the line "No Third-Party Recruiters - No Salespeople". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)
- Based in Redwood City, California, with about 880 LinkedIn followers and 860+ connections. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition - San Francisco, CA (Jul 2025 - Present)
- Production Engineer at Windsurf - Mountain View, California, United States (Sep 2024 - Present)
- Software Infrastructure Engineer at Volley Automation - South San Francisco, California, United States (Sep 2023 - Aug 2024): ● Fully re-architected on-prem central compute cluster from Dell PowerEdge Server to OnLogic
rugged industrial server, fully provisioned via Ansible & Terraform, to better support business
proposition & sales as well as reduce complexity & improve development velocity
● Architected all infrastructure in AWS for 24/7 livestream of production garage in downtown
SF for sales initiatives
● Updated legacy Terraform code (~ 9 months out of sync) to reflect current garage deployment
state including: AGVs, bay compute, and central cluster server infrastructure.
● Developed deployment pipelines for automated garage deployments using BitBucket, AWS
CodeBuild, and a combination of Bash and Python scripting (with multithreading to enable
simultaneous Terraform deployments to each piece of infrastructure).
● Instrumented Prometheus monitoring of all workloads running in Kubernetes. Configured
AlertManager reporting via Slack with 70 alerting rules. These alerts found previously
unknown bugs in both the VMWare csi-driver and FluentBit, which I later patched.
● Created security scan reports of all Docker images running in production & staging
environments with rankings according to CVE severity.
● Integrated CodeCov scans into PR pipelines for all production code including: C++, C#, &
Python. Reports of coverage diffs are posted to all new PRs going into the main branch.
● Developed all Ansible code to configure autonomous EV charging infrastructure as well as
K8s manifests, managed via Terraform, for deploying all relevant software and workloads to
said infrastructure.
- Robotics Reliability Engineer at Nuro - Mountain View, California, United States (Mar 2020 - Nov 2022): ● Owned, developed, and maintained the Secure Bot Network. Responsible for HA secure VPN
connections to all of Nuro’s fleet (Prii, Robots, etc.) for: debugging, remote monitoring,
lightweight live log upload of security/telemetry data, secure disk decryption key distribution,
secure remote gRPC through mTLS for offboard remote command control, etc.
● Assisted in the bring up of Nuro’s P2/R3 platform, debugged the issues observed, and
appropriately triaged all issues to the relevant owning teams to ensure proper long-term
resolution.
● Developed a solution to enable hot-plugging an external modem to the onboard compute &
automatically add it into the load balancing. Which enabled testing the P2/R3 platform on open
roads while awaiting firmware patches from the third party modem provider.
● Debugged all kinds of issues live on Nuro’s fleet, RCA-ed to appropriate HW/SW
components/modules and triaged to the appropriate owner to ensure proper long-term
resolution.
● Led the transition of RRE infrastructure to GKE by developing relevant Terraform modules.
● Led the transition of log upload from old in house tools to FileBeat & Logstash with an output
sink to Sumologic for greater scalability & automated security alerting on security critical logs
& metrics.
● Architected a new secure solution for engineers to SSH into live vehicles for debugging
purposes, sunsetting a single server that had been in use for years while considerably
increasing observability and auditability.
- Software Engineer at Spreetail - Lincoln, Nebraska (Jun 2019 - Mar 2020): DevOps Chapter

Additional Technologies: 

Data Clusters: Elasticsearch
Infrastructure As Code: Packer, Terraform
Monitoring: Prometheus
Proxies / Load Balancers: HAProxy, Nginx
SSO Authentication: Active Directory, Okta, Vouch-Proxy
- Software Development Intern at Spreetail - Lincoln, Nebraska (May 2018 - May 2019): DevOps - Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, Helm, Chef (Ruby), Octopus Deploy, GitLab-CI, Consul
Cloud Platforms - Azure
Scripting Languages - Powershell, Bash
Backend Languages - C#
Libraries - Hangfire, Topshelf, NewRelic
Hypervisors - Hyper-V

Full time in the summer. Continuing remote part-time work throughout the semester.
- Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University - Ames, IA (Aug 2018 - Dec 2018): Computer Science 362 - Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (Mr. Robert Ward)
- Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University - Ames, IA (Jan 2018 - May 2018): Software Engineering 339 - Software Architecture and Design (Dr. Lotfi Ben-Othmane)
- Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University - Ames, IA (Aug 2017 - May 2018): Computer Engineering 185 - Introduction to Problem Solving in C (Dr. Swamy Ponpandi)
- Technology Development Intern - DevOps at UnitedHealth Group - Eden Prairie, MN (Jun 2017 - Aug 2017): DevOps - Docker, AWS, OSE3
Backend Programming (REST API) - Go
Databases - MySQL
- Software Developer at Sodima Solutions - Ames, Iowa (Feb 2017 - May 2017): Bot Development - Python, MongoDB
- Teaching Assistant at Iowa State University - Ames, Iowa (Aug 2016 - Dec 2016): Computer Engineering 185 - Introduction to Problem Solving in C (Daniel Roggow)
- Software Developer at Flyer, LLC - Ames, IA (Jan 2016 - Mar 2016): Backend Developer (REST API) - Node.JS
Databases - MongoDB
- Intern at National Center for Supercomputing Applications - Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Area (Jun 2014 - Aug 2014): Systems Engineering - Telecommunication Services
Systems Administration - Network Configuration

## Education
- Iowa State University - Bachelor’s Degree, Software Engineering - (Jan 2015 - Jan 2019): Magna Cum Laude - 3.75/4.0
Minor in Cyber Security

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthew-vanderwerf-574a1a52_windsurf-activity-7262579356345016320-0_Qn
- https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf/
- https://github.com/matthewwerf
- https://api.github.com/users/matthewwerf/repos?per_page=100


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