- Joined
- Jan 2023
- How they joined
- Directly
- Before Cognition
- South Park CommonsMember
- Status
- Current
Overlapped before Cognition
Details
LocationSan Francisco Bay Area
Company sitecognition.ai
LanguagesEnglish, Mandarin, Spanish
UniversityCarnegie Mellon University
LeadershipPublic SpeakingC++JavaTeamworkCSSPython.NETJavascriptSocial MediaCVim
Notes
- Credited as a co-lead of Devin's MCP launch (MCP Marketplace, Datadog/Sentry integrations) in July 2025: Cognition's Theodor Marcu wrote 'Sara Xiang + Federico Marcos + Jeffrey Ling really cooked with this launch (I just got to be in the video but they deserve all the credit)'.Jul 23, 2025
- Pioneered Devin's video player ('timeline') feature, which lets users scrub step by step through every action Devin took across shell, editor and browser; Feature or Future newsletter interviewed her as 'the Cognition PM who pioneered this feature'.Jul 22, 2024
- Joined Cognition in September 2023 as Founding Product Manager (LinkedIn); public title elsewhere is 'Human Product Manager', a joke contrasting her with Devin, Cognition's AI software engineer. Joining ~6 months before Devin's March 2024 public launch puts her among the earliest product hires.Sep 2023
- Named to Exceptional Capital's Exceptional 100 (2026): 'Sara is a product manager at Cognition, having previously worked at Scale AI.'2026
- Cognition's August 2025 Linear integration upgrade (Devin auto-generating 'Linear Knowledge' from past tickets and PRs to scope tickets) drew 'Congrats Sara Xiang!!' comments.Aug 19, 2025
- Per the interview, the video player began as an internal observability tool for the Cognition team to track Devin's behavior with screenshots at each step; Xiang extended it to users, drawing inspiration from YouTube and other video players.Jul 22, 2024
- She cited interacting with a human coworker as the source of many Devin design decisions, e.g. users 'taking over' Devin's machine like tapping a coworker on the shoulder, and a 'Devin is typing...' placeholder instead of token streaming, mimicking Slack. Her design philosophy is making agents feel like colleagues.Jul 22, 2024
- Spent ~3.5 years at Scale AI (Jan 2019 to Jul 2022): Product & Engineering Manager, then Head of Content Understanding (also listed as General Manager, Content Understanding), the unit serving content-moderation and content-classification data labeling.Jul 2022
- Tagged with Bobby Nobakht on the September 2025 SonarSource partnership announcing the SonarQube MCP Server in Windsurf's Cascade MCP Store and Devin's MCP Marketplace.Sep 2025
- Marcu's same July 2025 post closes 'And with Windsurf, we'll cook even harder than ever before', written days after Cognition agreed to acquire Windsurf (July 2025); Xiang's later partner launches (SonarQube MCP in Windsurf and Devin) span both products.Jul 23, 2025
- Public headline says "Building Cognition".
- Thanked by Greylock (Sophia Luo) for thought partnership in its 2025 essay on AI-native user research, alongside Aatish Nayak, Bihan Jiang and Kevin Hou.Jun 2025
Experience
Founding Product Manager at Cognition
Sep 2023 - Present
San Francisco Bay Area
Member at South Park Commons
Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
New York, New York
Head of Content Understanding at Scale AI
Jan 2021 - Jul 2022
San Francisco, California
Product & Engineering Manager at Scale AI
Jan 2019 - Jan 2021
San Francisco, California
Scale is the data platform for AI. Used by ML teams at OpenAI, Airbnb, Nuro, Lyft and more. Funded by Founders Fund, Accel, Index, Coatue, Thrive, Spark, Y Combinator.
Software Engineering at Facebook
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018
Menlo Park, California
Oculus
Software Engineering at Twitter
Jan 2016 - Jan 2016
San Francisco, California
Twitter Moments
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Minor in Human Computer Interaction
Graduated with University Honors
Projects
Devin video player / session timeline (2024)
Devin MCP Marketplace launch (2025)
Devin Linear integration upgrade (2025)
SonarQube MCP partnership in Windsurf and Devin (2025)
Introduction to Computing NCWIT AspireIT camp (2014)
AchievementsExceptional Capital Exceptional 100 (2026) · CMU University Honors · NCWIT AspireIT grant ($3,000) for Introduction to Computing camp
Recent posts
January 2019
SF startup friends! Scale is moving out of our offices in mid November. Let me know if you're interested in subleasing...
Articles
Press
AwardsExceptional 100 (Exceptional Capital, 2026)
Profiles
Code
Repos46
Repos
Women-SCSRecurrent-Neural-Network-Szeged-WeatherSmartwatch-Text-Entry-Interface-With-TiltReactVRKeyboardViral-resistance
Languages
JavaScriptPythonJavaGoVue
