# Prem Nair

![Prem Nair](/resources/cognition/portraits/prem-nair.webp)

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Devin/Windsurf); Windsurf/Codeium employee #2; ex-Nuro, Zoox; Princeton CS  
Cognition  
Mountain View, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Nov 2021
- How they joined: With Windsurf (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/windsurf)
- Before Windsurf: Software Engineer, Nuro
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Codeium (Windsurf); Nuro; Google; Princeton University (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair
- X: @premqnair
- GitHub: https://github.com/pqn
- Website: https://premqunair.com/

## Notes
- Joined Cognition in July 2025 after Cognition acquired Windsurf (formerly Codeium/Exafunction); his announcement, verbatim: "I’ve joined Cognition to continue to work on the future of software engineering. ... Really excited to see how we can take the best of Devin and Windsurf to make the world’s best IDE and coding agents." (https://x.com/premqnair/status/1948420769945682413)
- Worked at Exafunction/Codeium/Windsurf from Nov 2021 to Jul 2025 as Software Engineer; LinkedIn post marked the rebrand: 'Excited to share Codeium is now Windsurf!' (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/premqnair_excited-to-share-codeium-is-now-windsurf-activity-7322706917867274240-LeMB)
- On Oct 24 2026 he replied 'Hope you like it! Pls send me your bugs' to a launch, and in Oct 2026 asked users what they would like 'to see Devin do'. (https://x.com/premqnair/status/2113822910540591553)
- Posted about Devin product work: 'One of the great things about Devin is that PRs are first class objects. Now that GitHub has PR stacks we’re excited to upgrade them!' (Jul 2026) and 'Devin computer use is undefeated' (Aug 2026). (https://x.com/premqnair/status/2082886438383940010)
- Acted as a GitHub maintainer of Codeium's open-source editor plugins as 'pqn': announced in Exafunction/codeium.nvim discussions that 'We adopted jcdickinson/codeium.nvim, and now it is Exafunction/codeium.nvim', and triaged issues across codeium.vim, codeium-chrome (JupyterLab 4 support) and CodeiumJetBrains. (https://github.com/Exafunction/windsurf.nvim/discussions/102)
- Co-authored with Anshul Ramachandran the Codeium blog 'Using Code Syntax Parsing for Generative AI' (15 March 2023), about the tool Codeium built and open-sourced to query code syntax for AI context. (https://www.mazure.fr/links/windsurf.html)
- At Exafunction (pre-Codeium GPU inference infrastructure) he co-authored the AWS ML blog post on Exafunction supporting AWS Inferentia, credited as 'Prem Nair, Software Engineer, Exafunction'. (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/exafunction-supports-aws-inferentia-to-unlock-best-price-performance-for-machine-learning-inference/)
- Co-author of the CVPR 2020 bias-mitigation paper 'Towards Fairness in Visual Recognition: Effective Strategies for Bias Mitigation' with Zeyu Wang, Klint Qinami, Ioannis Karakozis, Kyle Genova, Kenji Hata and Olga Russakovsky. (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/tool-helps-clear-biases-computer-vision)
- At Nuro (Jul 2018 - Oct 2021) he was a Software Engineer on Perception for the self-driving delivery vehicle; as 'prem-nuro' he engaged on google/s2geometry's Bazel support issue in Nov 2018. (https://github.com/google/s2geometry/issues/53)
- Princeton BS Computer Science 2018; senior thesis in Olga Russakovsky's Princeton Visual AI Lab: 'An Exploration of Multi-class Multi-domain Image Classification'. (https://visualai.princeton.edu/people.html)
- Public headline says "Coding @ Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Recommended Devin Fusion for model routing: 'IMO save yourself some trouble and use Devin Fusion instead.' (https://x.com/premqnair/status/2071644295438979544)
- Received the Phillip Goldman '86 Senior Prize in Computer Science at Princeton (Class of 2018). (https://visualai.princeton.edu/awards.html)
- At Zoox he worked in Simulation, first as an intern (May-Sep 2017) then as Software Engineer (Sep-Dec 2017). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Shared Princeton's George B. Wood Legacy Sophomore Prize with Hans Hanley at 2016 Opening Exercises, for exceptional academic achievement in sophomore year. (https://www.princeton.edu/news/2016/09/11/princeton-students-honored-opening-exercises)
- Interned at Google Research (summer 2016) building a prototype keyboard for ten-finger typing on tablet touch screens, and at Bloomberg LP (summer 2015) building a distributed graph data store in Apache Accumulo with Spark-parallelized SPARQL queries. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Led the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club: HackPrinceton officer (2014-15), Co-Director of TigerLaunch (2015-16), and Co-President (2016-17, ~20 directors, ~120 officers) alongside co-director Jennifer Lee. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Hello there; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Retweets Cognition milestones, including crossing $1B annualized revenue run rate (Sep 2026), SWE-2 (Sep 2026), running on NVIDIA Vera Rubin, and Jared Palmer joining to lead engineering (Jul 2026). (https://x.com/premqnair/status/2103679244257858015)
- Thanked departing colleague Moritz Stephan, who left Cognition for Hone: 'It was a real pleasure to have gotten to work (and workout) alongside @moritz_stephan at Cognition.' (https://x.com/premqnair/status/2087580455293853766)
- Previous roles include Software Engineer at Windsurf; Software Engineer at Nuro; Software Engineer at Zoox Inc.; Software Engineering Intern at Zoox Inc.; Co-President at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club; Co-Director of TigerLaunch at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club; Officer of HackPrinceton at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club; Software Engineering Intern in Research at Google. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)
- Early personal open source: a Python neural network based on Andrew Ng's course (2014, 2 stars), markov-poetry (2015), a PyTorch capsule-networks implementation (2018) and his personal site repo. (https://github.com/pqn)
- X account @premqnair (~5.8k followers, since 2011) bio: '@cognition/@windsurf, previously @nuro @princeton'. (https://x.com/premqnair)
- Personal blog (blog.premqunair.com) started mid-2022 with 'Why write'; his about page lists him as Software Engineer at Exafunction and links GitHub pqn. (https://blog.premqunair.com/blog/why-write)
- Location is Mountain View, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Jul 2025 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Windsurf - San Francisco Bay Area (Nov 2021 - Jul 2025)
- Software Engineer at Nuro - San Francisco Bay Area (Jul 2018 - Oct 2021): Perception
- Software Engineer at Zoox Inc. - San Francisco Bay Area (Sep 2017 - Dec 2017): Simulation
- Software Engineering Intern at Zoox Inc. - San Francisco Bay Area (May 2017 - Sep 2017): Simulation
- Co-President at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club - Princeton, NJ (May 2016 - May 2017): ~20 directors, ~120 officers
- Co-Director of TigerLaunch at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club - Princeton, NJ (May 2015 - Apr 2016): ~15 officers
- Officer of HackPrinceton at The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club - Princeton, NJ (Oct 2014 - Apr 2015)
- Software Engineering Intern in Research at Google - San Francisco Bay Area (May 2016 - Aug 2016): Google Research. Developed and tested a prototype keyboard for ten finger typing on tablet touch screens.
- Software Engineering Intern at Bloomberg LP - Greater New York City Area (May 2015 - Aug 2015): Developed a high performance distributed graph data store in Apache Accumulo.
Parallelized SPARQL graph queries with Apache Spark.
- Software Engineering Intern at Yosemite Intelligent Systems - Suzhou, Jiangsu, China (Jun 2013 - Aug 2014): Wrote CUDA-based neural networks/genetic algorithms.
Produced 5x speedup on a low-end GPU over original CPU code.

## Education
- Princeton University - Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science - (Jan 2014 - Jan 2018): Phillip Y. Goldman ’86 Prize in Computer Science
Accenture Prize in Computer Science
George B. Wood Legacy Sophomore Prize
Phi Beta Kappa
Tau Beta Pi
Sigma Xi

## Sources
- https://x.com/premqnair
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/premqnair
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/1948420769945682413
- https://visualai.princeton.edu/people.html
- https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/tool-helps-clear-biases-computer-vision
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/premqnair_excited-to-share-codeium-is-now-windsurf-activity-7322706917867274240-LeMB
- https://api.github.com/users/pqn/repos?per_page=100&sort=pushed
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michlimlim_my-buddy-prem-nair-was-engineer-2-at-windsurf-activity-7355686617514188800-FihO
- https://github.com/Exafunction/windsurf.nvim/discussions/102
- https://elestoque.org/2013/03/19/news/student-group-advances-finals-conrad-spirit-innovation-challenge/
- https://www.princeton.edu/news/2016/09/11/princeton-students-honored-opening-exercises
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/exafunction-supports-aws-inferentia-to-unlock-best-price-performance-for-machine-learning-inference/
- https://visualai.princeton.edu/awards.html
- https://www.mazure.fr/links/windsurf.html
- https://blog.premqunair.com/blog/why-write
- https://github.com/google/s2geometry/issues/53
- https://github.com/pqn
- https://blog.premqunair.com/about
- https://premqunair.com/
- https://news.hada.io/topic?id=22176
- https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/why-this-windsurf-ai-engineer-turned-down-a-big-google-offer-article-13327603.html
- https://m.36kr.com/p/3457918405252483
- https://oar.princeton.edu/handle/88435/pr1jg1z
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2110802287337799985
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2113822910540591553
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2082886438383940010
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2071644295438979544
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2112278245152526541
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2103679244257858015
- https://x.com/premqnair/status/2087580455293853766


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