# Neal Wu

![Neal Wu](/resources/cognition/portraits/neal-wu.webp)

Thinking Machines Lab | prev new stealth co, founding team @ Cognition  
Thinking Machines Lab  
United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Former Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Nov 2023
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Sales, Ramp
- Now: Thinking Machines Lab (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Olympiads: IOI gold 2008–2010 (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/olympiads/neal-wu-olp-4ede43a2315a5fd59008)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Google; Harvard University; Ramp (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu
- X: @neal_wu
- GitHub: https://github.com/nealwu

## Notes
- Joined Thinking Machines Lab in March 2026; announced: "I joined @thinkymachines to work with @johnschulman2, @miramurati, @soumithchintala, @dchaplot, @alexgartrell, and others on the future of collaborative AI!" He has since posted about Tinker recipes and the Inkling model releases. (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/2031846302489985435)
- Co-founded Sequence Holdings in 2025 with Alexander (Alex) Rubin and Michael Lee, a permanent holding company bringing AI and engineering to service businesses; it raised a $75M Series A in 2026. (https://www.trysignalbase.com/news/funding/sequence-holdings-raises-75m-series-a-funding)
- Launch-day post on Devin (March 12, 2024), quoted verbatim: "Today I can finally share Devin, the first AI software engineer, built by our team at @cognition_labs. Devin is capable of building apps end to end, finding bug..." (snippet as indexed). (https://x.com/neal_wu)
- On Devin's SWE-bench result, verbatim: "Excited to share more details on our state of the art SWE-bench result. We have some analysis of the results plus examples of the code edits Devin made. Check them out!" (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1768719751386157516)
- Stayed on as Founding Team and Advisor at Cognition (from 2023) after leaving for Sequence Holdings in 2025 and Thinking Machines Lab in 2026, per LinkedIn. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Won ICPC World Finals silver (2012, North America Champion) for Harvard with teammates Spencer Liang '12 and Alex Zhai '12. (https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2012/05/harvard-students-grab-silver-acm-programming-contest)
- IOI contestant for the USA; the IOI stats database lists 3 gold medals (2008-2010) on his profile. (https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/1667)
- Business Insider (Feb 2026) reported that Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab hired him as a three-time IOI gold medalist and founding member of Cognition, amid executive departures there. (https://www.businessinsider.com/mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab-hires-competitive-coder-neal-wu-2026-2)
- Open source: GitHub nealwu (1.6k followers) hosts competitive-programming (contest library code that others fork, e.g. conlacda/neal-wu-cp-lib), KillNewsFeed (Chrome extension that kills Facebook's News Feed, profiled by the NYT in 2014), BugChess and Twine forks. He is a member of the thinking-machines-lab GitHub org and contributes to tinker-cookbook (e.g. the forecasting recipe, PR #931). (https://github.com/nealwu)
- On Devin 2.0 / agent-native IDE, verbatim: "The future of software engineering is coming: try the new agent-native IDE where you can parallelize your tasks and code along with Devin! Also now available for only $20" (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1907870957534064869)
- On Devin GA, verbatim: "It's here: Devin is now generally available!" (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1866539668898189622)
- On Cognition's o1 evaluation, verbatim: "Check out our findings from OpenAI's powerful new 'o1' reasoning models at Cognition:" (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1834296784488989143)
- Cognition says its 10-person team had won 10 IOI gold medals combined as of March 2024; Neal is one of the gold medalists alongside founders Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI)
- Staff Software Engineer at Ramp from 2021 to 2023, with a brief Sales stint in 2023. He co-wrote Ramp's engineering blog post on merging code 5x faster with Young Kim (March 22, 2022). (https://builders.ramp.com/)
- Research Software Engineer at Google Brain from 2016 to 2020. He co-authored an ICLR 2019 paper with Mohammad Norouzi and Honglak Lee, according to Norouzi's publication page. (https://norouzi.github.io/)
- Codeforces handle 'neal' (from USACO): contest rating 3055, max 3147 (legendary grandmaster). (https://codeforces.com/profile/neal)
- Replying to ex-Ramp colleague Karim Atiyeh at Devin launch: "Thanks Karim! Excited to team up again" - Ramp co-founder Karim Atiyeh was congratulating him, showing the Ramp-to-Cognition network. (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1767631620444454937)
- Not Boring calls him a Cognition co-founder and a coding gold medalist who, before Cognition, was an early employee at Ramp. (https://www.notboring.co/p/ramp-and-the-ai-opportunity)
- Public headline says "Thinking Machines Lab | prev new stealth co, founding team @ Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Credited teammate Lawrence (ecnerwala) on Cognition's team: "Don't forget @ecnerwala!" in reply to Alex Kaplan's post about @DevinAI. (https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1890278549145506000)
- Won a Meta Hacker Cup round in August 2022 and posted a video of himself competing and explaining his solutions. (https://x.com/neal_wu?lang=en)
- Founding Engineer at Streem (2014-2015), which Box later acquired, then Head Teaching Fellow at Harvard (2014). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Interviewed by ACM XRDS with ICPC teammate Alex Zhai about their ICPC experience. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/2382856.2382863)
- Before graduating he interned at Facebook (2010), Jump Trading as an Algorithmic Trader Intern (2011), Quora (2012), and Kensho Technologies (2013-2014). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- My background is in machine learning, fintech, and competitive programming. I enjoy building companies and products that customers love, whether. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Previous roles include Sales at Ramp; Staff Software Engineer at Ramp; Research Software Engineer at Google Brain; Founding Engineer at Streem (acquired by Box); Head Teaching Fellow at Harvard University; Software Engineer Intern at Kensho Technologies; Software Engineer Intern at Quora; Algorithmic Trader Intern at Jump Trading LLC. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Education history includes Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science, Harvard University. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)
- Location is United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab (Jan 2026 - Present)
- Co-Founder and Advisor at Something new (Jan 2025 - Present)
- Founding Team and Advisor at Cognition (Nov 2023 - Present): Helping Cognition do whatever it takes to succeed: engineering, sales / customer success, recruiting, etc.
- Sales at Ramp (Jan 2023 - Aug 2023): Drove up customer activation and usage by figuring out why accounts were getting stuck, and built tooling for the sales team to get customers obsessed with using Ramp
- Staff Software Engineer at Ramp (Jun 2021 - Jan 2023): Backend product engineering
- Research Software Engineer at Google Brain - Mountain View (Oct 2016 - Jan 2020): Powered research at Brain, Google's AI research team
- Founding Engineer at Streem (acquired by Box) - San Francisco Bay Area (Apr 2014 - Jul 2015): Developed cloud desktop technology, and continued building out the tech at Box after acquisition
- Head Teaching Fellow at Harvard University (Jan 2014 - May 2014): Head Teaching Fellow for CS124, Intro to Algorithms (150 students)
- Software Engineer Intern at Kensho Technologies - Greater Boston Area (Sep 2013 - Apr 2014): Built trade optimizer, historical event importer, and grammar parsing for search
- Software Engineer Intern at Quora - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2012 - Sep 2012): Developed scoring algorithms to determine trending topics in real-time
- Algorithmic Trader Intern at Jump Trading LLC - Greater Chicago Area (Jun 2011 - Aug 2011): Learned the basics of financial markets and developed automated trading algorithms from scratch
- Software Engineer Intern at Facebook - San Francisco Bay Area (May 2010 - Aug 2010): Made improvements to the Ads API and refactored the enterprise bulk ad uploader to use the API internally

## Education
- Harvard University - Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science - (Jan 2010 - Jan 2014): Head Teaching Fellow for CS124 - Intro to Algorithms in Spring 2014
Teaching Fellow for CS50 - Intro to CS in Fall 2011 and CS124 in Spring 2012

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealwu
- https://github.com/nealwu
- https://x.com/neal_wu
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition_AI
- https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/1667
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Wu
- https://x.com/neal_wu?lang=en
- https://norouzi.github.io/
- https://www.trysignalbase.com/news/funding/sequence-holdings-raises-75m-series-a-funding
- https://www.businessinsider.com/mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab-hires-competitive-coder-neal-wu-2026-2
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/2053906451480068432
- https://builders.ramp.com/
- https://codeforces.com/profile/neal
- https://cphof.org/profile/topcoder:neal_wu
- https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2012/05/harvard-students-grab-silver-acm-programming-contest
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/2382856.2382863
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1866539668898189622
- https://www.notboring.co/p/ramp-and-the-ai-opportunity
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/2031846302489985435
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1768719751386157516
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1907870957534064869
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1834296784488989143
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1767631620444454937
- https://x.com/neal_wu/status/1890278549145506000


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