# Nikhil Jha

![Nikhil Jha](/resources/cognition/portraits/nikhil-jha.webp)

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (SWE-1.5); ex-Jane Street Linux engineer; Berkeley EECS  
Cognition  
Berkeley, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Sep 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Linux Engineer, Jane Street
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Amazon; UC Berkeley; Jane Street (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z
- GitHub: https://github.com/nikhiljha
- Website: https://nikhiljha.com/
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Credited as the second-listed author on Cognition's 'Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model' (2025-10-29), a frontier-size coding model served via Cerebras at up to 950 tok/s and shipped in Windsurf; he joined Cognition as Member of Technical Staff only about two months earlier (Sep 2025). (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5)
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf (the agentic IDE, formerly Codeium) on 2025-07-14, including its IP, product, brand and people; Nikhil joined Cognition in Sep 2025 from Jane Street. (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- Wrote Jane Street's 'A Higgs-bugson in the Linux Kernel' (2025-07-02), debugging a hard-to-reproduce kernel bug in Gord, the firm's system that stores and distributes trading activity data, over NFSv3 with Kerberos; his last public Jane Street artifact, published a month before he left. (https://blog.janestreet.com/a-higgs-bugson-in-the-linux-kernel/)
- Linux Engineer at Jane Street in New York (Aug 2024 - Aug 2025) after a summer 2023 Technology Internship there; Berkeley Traders Association lists him as 'Software Engineer, Jane Street, Class of 2024'. (https://traders.studentorg.berkeley.edu/members/)
- Co-author of 'NeCTAr: A Heterogeneous RISC-V SoC for Language Model Inference in Intel 16' (arXiv 2025-03-18) with Viansa Schmulbach, Jason Kim, Ethan Gao, Lucy Revina, Ethan Wu and Borivoje Nikolic, a 16nm chip tapeout running sparse ReLU-Llama inference; ties to his EE194 Intel tapeout TA role. (https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14708v1)
- Undergraduate researcher and systems administrator in Ken Goldberg's AUTOLab (Berkeley AI Research) from Jan 2021 to May 2024: wrote a Kubernetes scheduler for GPU ML jobs, automated permission/hosting requests, and built a system offloading compute-heavy ROS nodes to AWS EC2. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z)
- Led the Berkeley Open Computing Facility (OCF), the all-volunteer student computing org: Site Manager (2020-2021), Deputy Site Manager, then General Manager (May 2022 - May 2023); migrated its infra from Puppet to a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster serving 100k+ users. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z)
- SWE-1.5 co-authors listed with him include Jacob Teo, Connor Fogarty, Gary Chang, Theodor Marcu, Edison Zhang and Albert Tam, his nearest named collaborators at Cognition. (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5)
- Built RoSE (Remote Shell Environment), a Mosh replacement in Rust over QUIC using wezterm's terminal emulator (43 stars), hosted at rose.nikhiljha.com. (https://rose.nikhiljha.com/)
- Recent repos since joining Cognition: brouter (Swift macOS link router for browser profiles, Sep 2026), backforagammon (Jul 2026), jj-vanity (custom Jujutsu change IDs, Apr 2026) and a polydup fork, a steady side-project cadence while at Cognition. He has also forked SWE-agent, vllm, skypilot and chipyard. (https://github.com/nikhiljha)
- Other Rust/infra repos: mycelium (Minecraft server networks on Kubernetes), aeneid (GitHub SSH keys for sshd auth), adelie (keeps git-ops deployments up to date), arcanum (Vault secret sync operator); he also wrote ocf/postgres-operator for OCF. (https://github.com/nikhiljha)
- TA at Berkeley (Jun 2022 - May 2024) for CS61C Computer Architecture (two semesters), CS161 Computer Security (two semesters), EECS151 Digital Design, and EE194 Intel 22FFL Tapeout. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z)
- Most-starred open-source repo is pp-fedora-sdsetup (107 stars), a PinePhone Fedora image generator, from his Linux-on-phones period. (https://github.com/nikhiljha)
- Co-authored cloud-robotics work from AUTOLab with Kaiyuan Eric Chen, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Michael Danielczuk, Joseph Gonzalez, John Kubiatowicz and Ken Goldberg (cited as ref [54] in a UC Riverside thesis). (https://escholarship.org/content/qt6zn307z5/qt6zn307z5.pdf)
- Guest on Teleport's Access Control Podcast Episode 19 as OCF site manager, describing OCF's move from password SSH to open-source Teleport after UC Berkeley banned password-only SSH. (https://goteleport.com/resources/podcast/access-control-nikhil-jha/)
- Blog post 'Using a 1978 terminal in 2026 (DEC VT-100)' (2026-04-28) tests whether a VT-100 still works with modern terminals. (https://nikhiljha.com/posts/vt100/)
- Built the Berkeley AUTOLab website; its footer still reads 'Website built by Nikhil Jha for Berkeley AUTOLab'. (https://autolab.berkeley.edu/publications.shtml)
- OCF officers roster lists 'Nikhil Jha <njha>' as Site Manager alongside Oliver Ni in Spring 2024. (https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/about/officers)
- Software Dev Engineer Intern at Amazon in Seattle (summer 2022): reverse-engineered iOS library binaries for M1 Mac local dev and shipped a feature from design doc to A/B test. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z)
- Android Firmware Engineering Intern at Peloton (summer 2021): built HSM-based remote signing for OS releases and a 10x faster search service over 250GB+ AOSP repos. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z)
- Personal site tagline: 'Trying to do my best in a world taking off at breathtaking, superexponential speed.' (https://nikhiljha.com/)
- Uses the handle njha across LinkedIn (njha-z), the Jane Street blog author slug, his OCF username and Mastodon (fosstodon, moved to hachyderm.io). (https://fosstodon.org/@njha)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition - San Francisco Bay Area (Sep 2025 - Present)
- Linux Engineer at Jane Street - New York, NY (Aug 2024 - Aug 2025)
- Teaching Assistant at University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley, California, United States (Jun 2022 - May 2024): TA for CS61C (Computer Architecture) for two semesters, CS161 (Computer Security) for two semesters, EECS151 (Digital Design) for one semester, and then EE194 (Intel 22FFL Tapeout).
- Undergraduate Researcher, Systems Administrator - AUTOLab at Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research - Berkeley, California, United States (Jan 2021 - May 2024): •Reduced machine usage conflicts by writing a scheduler for GPU ML/AI jobs on Kubernetes.
•Eliminated an order of magnitude of researcher downtime by automating and writing an API for permission and hosting requests,administrative changes, and other services.
•Created a system to automatically offload compute-intensive ROS nodes to AWS EC2.
•Tools Used: Python 3, Kubernetes, Ansible, Vector, Grafana, ROS
- Technology Intern at Jane Street - New York, New York, United States (May 2023 - Aug 2023)
- General Manager at Open Computing Facility (May 2022 - May 2023)
- Deputy Site Manager at Open Computing Facility - Berkeley, California, United States (Dec 2021 - May 2022)
- Site Manager at Open Computing Facility - Berkeley, California, United States (Jul 2020 - Dec 2021): •Served 100k+ end-users with petabytes of data per year as technical lead of the Open Computing Facility.
•Migrated our infrastructure from Puppet to a bare metal Kubernetes cluster, built out from scratch with a small team on a low budget.
•Protected against 0ld-day attacks by writing a low-maintenance tool to automate dependency and infrastructure updates.
•Improved network-wide observability by configuring distributed tracing, logging, and monitoring.
•Tools Used: Kubernetes, Rust, Python 3, ElasticSearch, Puppet, ArgoCD, Cilium
- Staff at Open Computing Facility - Berkeley, California, United States (May 2020 - Jul 2020): - Made technical contributions to the open source configuration on GitHub
- Software Dev Engineer Intern at Amazon - Seattle, Washington, United States (May 2022 - Aug 2022): • Reverse-engineered the binary format of iOS libraries to port them for local development on M1 Macs.
• Shipped a complete production feature from design doc to code to A/B testing.
- Android Firmware Engineering Intern at Peloton Interactive (Jun 2021 - Aug 2021): •Reduced the amount of time the OS release process takes by implementing a secure remote signing workflow with HSMs.
•Saved engineer-hours by deploying a service that makes searching the many 250GB+ AOSP repositories 10x faster.
•Tools Used: AWS CloudHSM, AWS KMS, AWS EC2, Terraform, Java, Chef, Docker, Apache Lucene

## Education
- University of California, Berkeley - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - (Jan 2020 - May 2024)

## Sources
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-5
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/njha-z
- https://github.com/nikhiljha
- https://nikhiljha.com/
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://blog.janestreet.com/a-higgs-bugson-in-the-linux-kernel/
- https://usaco.org/current/data/jan19_platinum_results.html
- https://rose.nikhiljha.com/
- https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14708v1
- https://autolab.berkeley.edu/publications.shtml
- https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/about/officers
- https://escholarship.org/content/qt6zn307z5/qt6zn307z5.pdf
- https://goteleport.com/resources/podcast/access-control-nikhil-jha/
- https://api.github.com/users/nikhiljha/repos?per_page=100&sort=pushed
- https://nikhiljha.com/posts/vt100/
- https://traders.studentorg.berkeley.edu/members/
- https://fosstodon.org/@njha
- https://nikhiljha.com/posts/


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