# Tej Nair

Cognition | B.S. Math/CS @ UCSD  
Cognition  
San Francisco, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: Dec 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Software Engineer, Succinct
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: UC San Diego (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair
- X: @tejqnair
- GitHub: https://github.com/tqn
- Website: https://tejqunair.com/
- Domain: cognition.ai

## 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- 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. (https://github.com/succinctlabs/sp1)
- 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). (https://github.com/succinctlabs/example-sp1-wasm-verifier)
- Public headline says "Cognition | B.S. Math/CS @ UCSD". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- 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. (https://github.com/COGS118A/Group045-Wi23/blob/main/FinalProjectGroup045-Wi23.ipynb)
- 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). (https://nacorporatechess.com/standings?TournamentID=483)
- 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'. (https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/m6qttj31j4rp1pg15zx9n26o428jr5yk?find_parent=true)
- 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. (https://tejqunair.com/posts/)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- 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). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- 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'. (https://github.com/tqn)
- Built FRC robotics vision code (fork of BullsEye, 'Vision Processing for the FIRST Robotics Competition') and early crawler projects in CoffeeScript (phantom-crawler, findex) in 2015-2016. (https://github.com/tqn)
- Location is San Francisco, California, United States. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair)
- Publishes electronic music on SoundCloud (soundcloud.com/tej-nair), linked from his personal site; his LinkedIn also lists electronic music synthesis/composition as an interest. (https://tejqunair.com/)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition - San Francisco, California, United States (Dec 2025 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Succinct - San Francisco, California, United States (Jun 2024 - Oct 2025)
- Software Intern at Anduril Industries - Costa Mesa, California, United States (Jun 2022 - Sep 2022)
- Software Intern at Arista Networks - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2021 - Sep 2021)
- Software Engineer Intern at Yosemei Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd (圣美智能系统有限公司) - Suzhou, Jiangsu, China (Jan 2015 - Jan 2016): Two summers.
Built multithreaded microservice in Java for real time big data streaming/processing and hosting plugins, deployed at Foxconn to monitor factory machines.
Crawler/search engine app prototype in Node.js for personalized library of webpages.
3D simulation prototype of Foxconn factory floor in three.js, C++.

## Education
- UC San Diego - Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Computer Science - (Jan 2020 - Jan 2023)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejqnair
- https://github.com/succinctlabs/sp1/commits?author=tqn
- https://github.com/tqn
- https://usaco.org/current/data/dec16_bronze_results.html
- https://usaco.org/current/data/jan17_silver_results.html
- https://tejqunair.com/posts
- http://tejqunair.com/
- https://api.github.com/users/tqn/repos?per_page=100&sort=updated
- https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring18/cos598B/
- https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/team.jsp?team_id=146256
- https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/m6qttj31j4rp1pg15zx9n26o428jr5yk?find_parent=true
- https://nacorporatechess.com/standings?TournamentID=483
- https://github.com/COGS118A/Group045-Wi23/blob/main/FinalProjectGroup045-Wi23.ipynb
- https://github.com/succinctlabs/example-sp1-wasm-verifier
- https://x.com/tejqnair
- https://github.com/succinctlabs/sp1
- https://tejqunair.com/posts/
- https://tejqunair.com/


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