# Oliver Ni

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition building Devin; creator of Pokétwo; ex-Jane Street, Apple; Berkeley EECS/Math  
Cognition  
United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Jan 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: UC Berkeley (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverni
- X: @mcparadip
- GitHub: https://github.com/oliver-ni
- Website: https://oliver.ni/
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- On Cognition joining forces with the Dioxus team (X, verbatim): "@jhanikhil and I always loved dioxus... We played around with it in college while running the Open Computing Facility and later Nikhil built the first versions of cognition's dioxus terminal renderer, which became the basis for Devin CLI. Super pumped to join forces with @jkelleyrtp to continue building great software :)" - links his OCF co-admin Nikhil Jha to Cognition and to Devin CLI. (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2098124871825854816)
- On the Devin harness rewrite (X, verbatim): "earlier this year we completely rearchitected the devin harness to separate the brain from the remote, enabling us to build features like outposts faster and more reliably!". (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2079630493365264398)
- Created Pokétwo, a Pokémon-themed Discord game bot with 5 million users across 1 million communities, served by a Kubernetes cluster handling 10,000+ requests per second; he still maintains its infra (poketwo/nix) with Devin-authored PRs. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- On Devin Fusion (X, verbatim): "turns out Devin Fusion isn't just marketing :) performance really is as good as Fable, enough so that many peeps daily drive Fusion at cog + our internal automations all run on it". He adds he "used to get upset whenever people sent me PRs made with Fusion & try to remake them with Fable". (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2098528943317901491)
- On Cognition joining forces with Poke (X, verbatim): "to this day, poke is still the only agent i've used that i actually enjoy talking to... so excited to join forces w/ @samyok and co!" - his public reaction to Cognition bringing in the Poke team. (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2080332453659697460)
- Site Manager of Berkeley's Open Computing Facility (Jul 2023-Apr 2025): administered Linux infra for 80,000+ students and faculty, architected bare-metal Kubernetes and introduced NixOS desktops; co-ran it with Nikhil Jha (njha.dev), who also went on to Cognition. His repos transpire (Nix-based Kubernetes management) and ocf-nix-desktops come from this work. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Personal site, verbatim: "I work at Cognition, where I'm building the future of software engineering, or something like that." (https://oliver.ni/)
- On Devin cloud Macs (X, verbatim): "devin is now the easiest way to get a cloud mac vm :) even putting aside the coding agent part" - posted alongside Cognition's 'Devin just got a Mac' launch. (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2099922109967569332)
- Software Engineering Intern at Jane Street, May-Aug 2024: enhanced the firm-wide statistical analysis service and built readiness monitoring with rolling updates for an internal infrastructure management system. He later joked on X "I can offer 11 boxes of jane street Rubik's cubes". (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Technology Lead of the Berkeley Math Tournament since Dec 2020 and Tournament Director Jul-Dec 2025; BMT reaches 4,000+ students yearly. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Public headline says "(~'o')~". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverni)
- Is a listed member of Cognition's GitHub org (usacognition) and of the Exafunction org (the Codeium/Windsurf GitHub org Cognition acquired). (https://github.com/Exafunction)
- Built ContestDojo, an online math competition platform with 30,000+ users that hosts Berkeley Math Tournament and Johns Hopkins Math Tournament. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Reposted Cognition's announcement that it raised over $2B at a $48B valuation. (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2097374946875867594)
- Uses Devin on his own open-source infra: poketwo/nix commits are co-authored by oliver-ni and devin-ai-integration[bot], e.g. PR #19 separating NixOS and Kubernetes CI workflows. (https://github.com/poketwo/nix)
- Hardware Technology Intern at Apple, Jun-Aug 2023: built a unified internal platform for wireless simulation data processing and visualization, including a specialized query language. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Posted (verbatim) "incredible things are happening on the cog slack / future of software engineering guys", his most-liked original post in the sample (66 likes). (https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2102560737440985479)
- Listed on the Intercollegiate Math Tournament team as "Tournament Director, Berkeley Math Tournament (2025-)" alongside organizers from HMMT, SCMC and CMIMC. (https://intercollegiatemathtournament.org/)
- Undergraduate course staff for Berkeley CS 162 (Operating Systems), Jan-May 2024, teaching 400+ students. (https://oliver.ni/work/)
- Self-described on his site as a San Jose programmer interested in distributed systems and cloud infra, a fan of Kubernetes, Elixir, Rust and Nix/NixOS; his 88x31 friend buttons link Kyle He, Albert Tam, Trinity Chung, Michael Lisano, Nikhil Jha, Ben Cuan and others from the OCF/Berkeley circle. (https://oliver.ni/)
- X handle @mcparadip (account created 2013, bio "@cognition", San Jose, CA); the handle dates to his Minecraft YouTube channel of the same name. (https://x.com/mcparadip)
- Listed among AlphaStar Academy's student accolades (USACO/math competition alumni list) next to Rahul Chalamala and Rain Li. (https://alphastar.academy/accolades/)
- Location is United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverni)

## Experience
- Software Engineering Intern at Jane Street (May 2024 - Aug 2024): Enhanced firm-wide statistical analysis service and built readiness monitoring with rolling updates for internal infrastructure management system.
- Undergraduate Course Staff at UC Berkeley CS 162: Operating Systems (Jan 2024 - May 2024): Taught 400+ students operating systems concepts.
- Hardware Technology Intern at Apple (Jun 2023 - Aug 2023): Built unified internal platform for wireless simulation data processing and visualization, including a specialized query language.
- Site Manager at Open Computing Facility (UC Berkeley) (Jul 2023 - Apr 2025): Administered Linux infrastructure; architected bare-metal Kubernetes and NixOS desktops.
- Technology Lead; Tournament Director (Jul-Dec 2025) at Berkeley Math Tournament (Dec 2020 - present): Largest student-run math tournament, 4,000+ students annually.

## Education
- University of California, Berkeley - Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences - (Aug 2022 - Dec 2025)
- University of California, Berkeley - Bachelor of Arts - BA, Mathematics - (Aug 2022 - Dec 2025)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverni
- https://oliver.ni/work/
- https://github.com/Exafunction
- https://oliver.ni/
- https://alphastar.academy/accolades/
- https://usaco.org/current/data/jan22_gold_results.html
- https://intercollegiatemathtournament.org/
- https://github.com/poketwo/nix
- https://x.com/mcparadip
- https://github.com/oliver-ni
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2098124871825854816
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2079630493365264398
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2098528943317901491
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2080332453659697460
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2099922109967569332
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2097374946875867594
- https://x.com/mcparadip/status/2102560737440985479


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