Engineering · Member of Technical Staff

Tej Nair

“Cognition | B.S. Math/CS @ UCSD”

LinkedIn X GitHub Website

Joined: Dec 2025
How they joined: Directly
Before Cognition: SuccinctSoftware Engineer
Status: Current

Overlapped before Cognition

UC San Diego3

Sources¹linkedin.com

Autumn profile

Researched with Autumn · 2026-11-04

Details

LocationSan Francisco, California, United States

Company sitecognition.ai

LanguagesChinese, English

UniversityUC San Diego

ScalaSQLPostgreSQLC++JavaPython (Programming Language)Web DesignMathematicsJavaScriptRust (Programming Language)React.jsMicrosoft OfficeApplication Programming InterfacesHaskellGo (Programming Language)Node.jsMachine LearningLeadershipComputer ScienceProgramming

Notes

Before Cognition, spent Jun 2024 - Oct 2025 as a Software Engineer at Succinct in San Francisco, the zero-knowledge proof company behind the SP1 zkVM; joined Cognition as Member of Technical Staff in Dec 2025, about two months after leaving.Dec 2025
Contributed 138 commits to succinctlabs/sp1 (SP1 zkVM), last active 2025-10-08, the same month he left Succinct; commit subjects include verifier support for compressed proofs ('feat(verifier): support compressed proofs besides checking vkey (#848)') and SP1ProverBuilder API changes.Oct 8, 2025
GitHub lists @tqn (Tej Qu Nair) among top contributors to Succinct repos sp1, sp1-gpu (moongate), kzg-rs and example-sp1-wasm-verifier, alongside Succinct engineers Yuwen Zhang (@yuwen01) and Tamir Hemo (@tamirhemo).
Public headline says "Cognition | B.S. Math/CS @ UCSD".
Graduated UC San Diego with a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science (2020-2023), finishing in three years; a UCSD COGS 118A group project (Winter 2023) on serum cholesterol and heart disease lists him with Sang Tran, Angel Olivas and Stanley Sisson.2023
Interned as a software engineer at Anduril Industries in Costa Mesa, CA (Jun-Sep 2022) and played on Anduril's team in the North American Corporate Chess League Season 5 (rating 1216).2022
Interned at Arista Networks (Jun-Sep 2021); an Apache mailing-list thread from 'Tej Nair <>' dated 2021-08-30 asks about 'Difficulties writing custom parser in SBT build system'.Aug 30, 2021
Personal blog tejqunair.com covers PL theory and Rust: 'Learning Rust by Simulating Heat Diffusion' (2019-05-05), a two-part Lambda Calculus series with a Rust interpreter (2019-06), and 'Categories: the basics, towards (co)monads (Part 1)' (2020-09-05); matching rslambda repo on GitHub.Sep 5, 2020
Two summers (2015-2016) as a software engineer intern at Yosemei Intelligent Systems in Suzhou, China: built a multithreaded Java microservice for real-time big-data streaming deployed at Foxconn to monitor factory machines, plus a three.js 3D simulation of a Foxconn factory floor.2015
Passionate about programming, math, AI, ML, compilers, programming language theory, distributed systems, science, and electronic music synthesis/composition; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning.
Previous roles include Software Engineer at Succinct; Software Intern at Anduril Industries; Software Intern at Arista Networks; Software Engineer Intern at Yosemei Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd (圣美智能系统有限公司).
Advent of Code solutions repo (Scheme, updated 2024-12) is described as 'My highly polished Advent of Code solutions. I took the opportunity to learn various languages'.Dec 2024

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