Engineering · Member of Technical Staff

Rohan Choudhury

“Researcher @ Cognition”

Joined: Dec 2025
How they joined: Directly
Before Cognition: ByteDanceStudent Researcher
Status: Current

Overlapped before Cognition

“when I joined Cognition, training our own frontier-class model felt like a dream that was far away. We got there in 6 months - faster than even our most optimistic projection. With this team, truly anything feels possible.”

Member of Technical Staff, Research · Jul 2026 · X

Sources¹linkedin.com ²linkedin.com

Autumn profile

Researched with Autumn · 2026-11-04

Details

LocationSan Francisco, California, United States

Company sitecognition.com

LanguagesBengali, English, French

UniversityCarnegie Mellon University

ProgrammingRunningFrenchPhysicsPianoStatisticsData AnalysisTeachingPowerPointLaTeXPythonJavaResearch

Notes

Third author on 'SWE-1.7: Frontier Intelligence at a Fraction of the Cost' (2026-07-08), after co-leads Ben Pan* and Carlo Baronio*; SWE-1.7 came from RL pipeline improvements on top of Kimi K2.7, trained in Devin's harness.Jul 8, 2026
On SWE-1.7 launch day he wrote on X: "when I joined Cognition, training our own frontier-class model felt like a dream that was far away. We got there in 6 months - faster than even our most optimistic projection. With this team, truly anything feels possible. Try SWE-1.7 with Cerebras today - you'll be blown away."Jul 8, 2026when I joined Cognition, training our own frontier-class model felt like a dream that was far away. We got there in 6 months - faster than even our most optimistic projection. With this team, truly anything feels possible. Try SWE-1.7 with Cerebras today - you'll be blown away.
Lead (first-listed) author on Cognition's 'Introducing SWE 1.6: Improving Model UX' (2026-04-07), the model optimized for intelligence and model UX, shipped generally available in Windsurf at up to 950 tok/s with a 3-month free tier.Apr 7, 2026
Announced on X on 2026-03-01: "I guess now is as good a time as any to announce that I finished my PhD and started as a researcher at @cognition! This has been a wild first project with an absolutely insane team, excited for what's coming next"; Cognition colleagues Ben Pan (@ybenpan) and Timothy Luong replied.Mar 1, 2026
Quoted by Forbes in Aug 2024 as a CMU robotics PhD using Codeium's AI coding assistant, adopted 'on his former colleagues' suggestion': "Most of the time it just works out of the box." Codeium (Windsurf) was later acquired by Cognition.Aug 2024
On FrontierCode 2.0 he wrote: "With FC2.0 we've tried to measure the models on "true" software engineering skills, and the result is a ranking that imo matches with the vibes. it turns out this isn't quite saturated yet (for now)"Oct 27, 2026With FC2.0 we've tried to measure the models on "true" software engineering skills, and the result is a ranking that imo matches with the vibes. it turns out this isn't quite saturated yet (for now)
Co-author of Cognition's FrontierCode code-quality benchmark (2026-06) and FrontierCode 1.1 (2026-07-07) with Eric Lu, Ben Pan, Fermi Ma, Alex Lombardi, Deniz Birlikci and others; he tweeted: "Agents are writing more code than ever, yet we all viscerally know the code isn't high-quality. We worked hard to make a benchmark to quantify this "slop" aspect. We expect this benchmark will saturated sooner than later but models that perform well on it will be a joy to use."Jul 7, 2026
On Devin Desktop he wrote: "a year ago i was hand-typing print statements and ipdb.set_trace(). today that feels quaint. devin desktop is a big step towards the future of software!"Jun 3, 2026
Co-author of 'An Early Preview of SWE-1.6 and Research Update' (2026-03) with Carlo Baronio, Ben Pan, Sam Lee, Eric Lu, Steven Cao, Adam Zweiger and others; the preview landed around the time he publicly announced joining, matching his 'wild first project' tweet.Mar 2026
Cognition acquired Windsurf (formerly Codeium/Exafunction), taking its IP, product, trademark and brand in July 2025, days after Google DeepMind hired Windsurf's CEO Varun Mohan; SWE-1.x models he trains ship in Windsurf (Devin Desktop).Jul 14, 2025
Windsurf/Codeium co-founder Varun Mohan previously worked at Nuro, where Rohan was a software engineer 2019-2021.Aug 2024
Reshared Cognition's funding announcements on LinkedIn: "proud to be a part of this!" on the $1B+ raise at a $26B valuation (2026-05-27) and "so lucky to be a part of this ride!" on the $2B+ raise at a $48B valuation (2026-09-09).Sep 9, 2026

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