Engineering · Member of Technical Staff

Samuel Hsiang

LinkedIn X GitHub

Joined: Jan 2026
How they joined: Directly
Before Cognition: Hudson River TradingAlgorithm Engineer
Status: Current

Overlapped before Cognition

Sources¹linkedin.com ²linkedin.com ³linkedin.com

Autumn profile

Researched with Autumn · 2026-11-04

Details

LocationNew York, New York, United States

UniversityHarvard University

JavaMicrosoft Office

Notes

Posted on X on 2026-02-24, word for word: "it's never been a better time to build, and it's never been easier to try devin!", a public push for Cognition's Devin about seven weeks after joining.Feb 24, 2026it's never been a better time to build, and it's never been easier to try devin!
Posted on X on 2026-02-11, word for word: "doing my part Co-authored-by: Staging-Devin AI". The joke is a git commit trailer crediting an internal staging build of Devin as co-author.Feb 11, 2026doing my part Co-authored-by: Staging-Devin AI
Joined Cognition (maker of Devin and Windsurf) as a Member of Technical Staff in January 2026, after roughly two years at Hudson River Trading; he joined about six months after Cognition's July 2025 Windsurf acquisition.Jan 2026
Co-authored the open-source 'Crash Course Coding Companion' / CS Guide (github.com/alwayswimmin/cs_guide, "Collection of Useful CS Algorithms", about 124 stars and 11 forks) with Alexander Wei (Phillips Exeter) and Yang Liu. It is a LaTeX competitive-programming textbook.
Algorithm Engineer at Hudson River Trading from February 2024 to January 2026, a quant/HFT algorithm role between his autonomous-vehicle and AI-agent work. Public sources do not name his specific HRT desk or team.Feb 2024
Won a silver medal at the US Physics Olympiad (USAPhO) with TJ Physics Team teammates Allen Cheng and Ross Dempsey (silver) and Charles Wang (gold); Franklyn Wang and Alexander Heckett took bronze.2016
Co-captain of the TJHSST Senior Computer Team in 2015-16 with captain Nate Foss, co-captain Ashley Kim and statistician Jason Lam (sponsor Mr. Rudwick).2015
Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the agentic IDE, in July 2025 (IP, product, trademark, brand and team); this is the company behind what is now Devin Desktop/Windsurf, the product line Hsiang works alongside.Jul 2025
Harvard University, Bachelor's in Statistics (AB 2020 class year per Harvard Alumni Day list; LinkedIn shows 2016-2019). He is listed among the Harvard Department of Statistics alumni.2019
Codeforces handle alwayswimmin (Samuel Hsiang, from TJHSST): current rating 1946, max 2033 (Candidate Master). He uses the same handle on GitHub.
Reposted Michelle Lim's (@michlimlim) October 2025 launch of Flint, "autonomous" self-building websites; Flint later publicly noted it was already powering pages for @cognition.Oct 15, 2025
Won bronze at the Princeton University Physics Competition (PUPC) onsite round, and was on TJ's online PUPC team (Allen Cheng, Ross Dempsey, Ray Liu, Nirmaan Shanker, Akhil Waghmare) that earned an Honorable Mention.2015

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