# Willy Xiao

![Willy Xiao](/resources/cognition/portraits/willy-xiao.webp)

Engineering Manager, Cloud Product at Cognition (Devin); ex-Rippling, Envoy, OfficeTogether, Facebook  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Engineering Manager (Engineering)
- Joined: May 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Senior Engineering Manager - Time Products, Rippling
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Harvard University; Meta; Rippling (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao
- X: @willyxiao1
- GitHub: https://github.com/willyxiao
- Website: http://willyxiao.com
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Joined Cognition in May 2026 as Engineering Manager leading the Cloud Product team; in his spotlight he writes: "I joined to lead our Cloud Product team – but 'Engineering Manager' here doesn't mean stepping away from the work. I set direction, build the team, and still ship alongside it." (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao)
- When he asked Scott Wu what he was needed for, given he was "a full-stack engineer with ten years of experience, not a competitive programmer or AI researcher", the answer was: "Execute... We need people who have seen this before." He explicitly states he has no competitive-programming background. (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao)
- Shipped Microsoft Teams & 365 MCPs for Devin. Quote: "My team launched teams & 365 MCPs! Tag Devin like a co-worker now in the Microsoft suite :)

So now you can ask your favorite junior engineer Devin AI to play Minesweeper in a Windows VM in Microsoft Teams on a PC

https://lnkd.in/gVn_vGef" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_my-team-launched-teams-365-mcps-tag-devin-activity-7508678466788179969-jMLD, https://lnkd.in/gVn_vGef)
- Shipped Devin in Slack code channels (credits Aidan Blum Levine). Quote: "My team shipped Devin in slack code channels today!

In my view, Devin is the "most ambitious" cloud agent. It started as an autonomous co-worker in the cloud (rather than a devtool that got moved to the cloud) and today's launch of Slack Code Channels is just another step in that direction!

As one of my friends said recently: "Devin will find a way."

Kudos Aidan Blum Levine on working on this, I was just a cheerleader on the side :)." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_what-comes-to-mind-when-you-think-of-a-great-activity-7496286159837495296-uv6I)
- OfficeTogether (Mar 2021 - Aug 2022): Head of Engineering and first full-time engineer at the 11-person seed-stage hybrid-office startup founded by Amy Yin; acquired by Envoy in Aug 2022, which is how he became an Envoy EM. (https://medium.com/@willyxiao/i-left-facebook-to-join-a-seed-stage-startup-heres-how-my-life-changed-e170baf19bf)
- Was in the room for the birth of Devin Fusion: an engineer asked "Wait. What if we could make Fable as cheap as Opus?" and "By the end of the night, we had the beginnings of Devin Fusion." (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao)
- On Cognition passing $1B annualized revenue run rate. Quote: "This ones for our customers!

It's a good feeling right now to be at Cognition. The flywheel is working and every day I get to come in, find issues, and make changes to the product in a way that will make real improvements for people using Devin.

If you're interested in working with me, let me know :)" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_cognition-has-crossed-1b-in-annualized-revenue-activity-7509293043628429312-paEq)
- Working closely with Dioxus Labs founder Jonathan Kelley (@jkelleyrtp), whose team joined Cognition to work on Devin VMs. Quote: "I’ve been getting to work with @jkelleyrtp pretty closely in the last few weeks - lots of exciting improvements already here and coming to Devin VMs as a result :)

Welcome!!" (https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2098123501672841232)
- In a Dec 2025 EOY post, while still at Rippling, he argued SaaS was not dead and wrote: "I've worked my entire career mostly not that interested in building 'dev tools' for engineers." Five months later he joined Cognition, a devtools/agent company. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_staff-full-stack-software-engineer-backend-activity-7411520604853596161-G-aW)
- Rippling (Jan 2024 - May 2026): Senior Engineering Manager for Talent Products (Learning Management, Surveys, AI-assisted review cycles; grew from $8mm to $20mm run rate), then Time Products (led 3 managers, 25 people; ~$25mm ARR; incubated the Time Platform team after a competitor acquisition, leading Rippling's first DB write-sharding). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- Facebook/Meta (2015 intern, 2016-2021): App Distribution SWE who launched the 'Beam' P2P app-sharing MVP on Android (patented); Community Integrity data science in FB London, where he founded the Actor Experience Data Team and the Account Integrity Metrics (AIM) team; then Tech Lead of News Tab Growth, growing News Tab from ~10k to ~15mm DAU. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- On Devin's multiplayer sessions. Quote: "I'm most excited about what.

Devin is multiplayer by default. Anyone can talk to and read your devin sessions. If you've ever heard the phrase: "build publicly" or have encouraged people to use "public slack channels" instead of private DMs you'll know the impact that has on the ability for anyone in your company to onboard and gain context.

Memory / Dreaming is just the start of what we can do here - now imagine what we'll discover when the entire company s" (https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2107177340786840022)
- Describes Cognition's culture: "This wasn't the '9-9-6' I had heard about from the outside... The intensity was obvious, but so was the joy." and "None of that makes Cognition a 'chill' company... We are here to win." He also notes he has a newborn, dressed in a Devin onesie by colleagues. (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao)
- Promoted the Devin iOS app running a macOS VM. Quote: "Maybe you never wanted to use an iOS app to run a macOS vm to play a game in an iOS simulator.

Or maybe it just wasn’t possible until now?

Get the Devin for iOS app here: Devin.ai/ios or ping me here if you’re looking for a job :)" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_maybe-you-never-wanted-to-use-an-ios-app-activity-7511554183318286336-OpZN)
- On Devin in Microsoft Teams. Quote: "@DevinAI  was always thought of from the start as a co-worker / "ott-onomous" software engineer rather than just a devtool.

Now you can tag Devin in Microsoft Teams to launch a windows VM to play minesweeper on @DevinAI :) Or, write some code :)

Check out our blog post here:
https://t.co/7Pek8HYoLQ" (https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2102826645937967327, https://t.co/7Pek8HYoLQ)
- Shared Devin plugins launch, crediting Mokshit Jain, Matt Schrage, Morgante Pell and Aidan Blum Levine. Quote: "Use your existing plugins (skills, hooks, MCPs) in Cognition! Also, you can govern what's available / blocked at the enterprise level!

Great job
Mokshit Jain, Matt Schrage, Morgante ⚡ Pell, Aidan Blum Levine and co!" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_introducing-devin-plugins-built-on-the-emerging-activity-7503504349608706049-K5s0)
- Envoy (Aug 2022 - Jan 2024): Engineering Manager for Envoy Rooms (team of 8, >1000 QPS backend) then Envoy Workplace, launching a new SKU to >$4mm ARR with 350 paid customers in 6 months and managing ~15 engineers. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- Public headline says "Engineering Manager at Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- Open source: co-built OneVote, a distributed blockchain-based voting system in C++ (gRPC/protobuf), with Harvard classmates Jonah Kallenbach (later Reverie Labs co-founder), Matt Rauen and Ankit Gupta; the repo is jonahkall/blockchain-voting. (https://github.com/jonahkall/blockchain-voting)
- On token ROI tooling in Devin. Quote: "One of the best ways to improve your organization's overall "token ROI" is just by allocating tokens to those who have already demonstrated they do this well. Now, let Devin help you do this!" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_what-if-your-ai-budget-went-to-the-engineers-activity-7517997105802539008-mfEa)
- Recounts colleague Eric Lu using a swarm of Devins to factor RSA-260 as a side project, and describes Slack triage Devins routing issues straight to the right Devin or PR author. (https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao)
- Quote: "Now you can use the Devin iOS app to run a macOS vm to run an iOS app.

It can even take a recording of it and send to me :) https://t.co/QS7mPjRMqU" (https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2105738596640760073, https://t.co/QS7mPjRMqU)
- Wrote 'How OfficeTogether ships features in < 2 weeks', describing a 14-day median feature lead time with engineers in Romania (via Amplified) and QA in Hyderabad. (https://medium.com/@willyxiao/how-officetogether-ships-features-in-2-weeks-2b377e253604)
- OfficeTogether founder Amy Yin's acquisition letter names Willy among her colleagues; Envoy announced the acquisition of the desk-reservation startup. (https://officetogether.medium.com/officetogether-joins-team-envoy-a-thank-you-from-the-founder-d58c634f2a02)
- Harvard joint A.B./A.M. in Computer Science and Statistics (2012-2016); CS50 teaching assistant 2013-2015; interned at LiveRamp (2014) and Facebook (2015). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- Eagle Scout who served on the Executive Committee of the 2019 24th World Scout Jamboree and was named to Scouting America's National Executive Board. (https://www.scoutingnewsroom.org/scouting-america-welcomes-new-national-executive-board-members/)
- Describes himself at Facebook as an Android Engineer on the Emerging Markets Growth team before leaving after 4.5 years. (https://medium.com/@willyxiao/i-left-facebook-to-join-a-seed-stage-startup-heres-how-my-life-changed-e170baf19bf)
- His CS50 final project (Dec 2012) was a website letting debaters enter and track competition results; Harvard Crimson photo shows him explaining it to Daniel Taylor '15. (https://www.thecrimson.com/image/2012/12/11/CS502/)
- Previous roles include Senior Engineering Manager - Time Products at Rippling; Senior Engineering Manager - Talent Products at Rippling; Engineering Manager, Envoy Workplace at Envoy; Engineering Manager, Envoy Rooms at Envoy; Head Of Engineering at OfficeTogether; Tech Lead, News Tab Growth at Facebook; Data Science & Engineering, Community Integrity at Facebook; Software Engineer, App Distribution at Facebook. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)
- Wrote for the Harvard Independent, including 'Ship Love: on the (nearly lethal) comforts of a Silicon Valley internship'. (https://harvardindependent.com/tag/willy-xiao/)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao)

## Experience
- Engineering Manager at Cognition - San Francisco (May 2026 - Present)
- Senior Engineering Manager - Time Products at Rippling - San Francisco, CA (Jul 2025 - May 2026): 55% of Americans are hourly workers, which require scheduling, clock-in, overtime and pay rate computations. 

- Led 3 managers and 25 total people.
- Grew the highest QPS product at Rippling, which grew at >70% organically year over year (~$25mm ARR).
- Incubated the "Time Platform" team directly to support a 3-4x increase in users after acquiring a competitor product, which led to the first load-testing and write-sharding of databases at Rippling.
- Senior Engineering Manager - Talent Products at Rippling - New York, NY (Jan 2024 - Jul 2025): I built and managed a product engineering team in the "Talent Products" suite, which includes Learning Management, Surveys, and AI-assisted review cycles. I grew the team from 8mm to 20mm run rate business by the end, and my team increased the growth rate from 48% to over 100% annually.

In the last year, we've launched some features like:
* https://www.rippling.com/blog/introducing-talent-signal
* https://www.rippling.com/blog/custom-courses-in-rippling
* https://www.rippling.com/blog/go1-partnership
- Engineering Manager, Envoy Workplace at Envoy - New York, New York, United States (Jan 2023 - Jan 2024): Envoy is a16z and Brookfield backed with a $1.4bn valuation.

- Launched Envoy Workplace, a new SKU encompassing all Envoy products to manage a physical office. In my time, this SKU included: in-office scheduling, "return-to-office" occupancy analytics, desk reservations, conference room reservations, deliveries, and emergency notifications.
- Grew ARR to > $4mm with 350 paid customers within 6 months of launch. My team launched several new products and created new platforms for billing and feature gating for all Envoy services.
- Ultimately, managed and hired into 2 teams of 15 engineers across FE, BE, and mobile. This was about 1/3 of the engineering ICs at Envoy.
- Proposed and aligned the engineering org around Velocity OKRs and a Tech Debt "Hit List" Framework.
- Engineering Manager, Envoy Rooms at Envoy - New York, New York, United States (Aug 2022 - Jan 2023): - Led a team of 8 engineers to launch a major refactor and product improvements to Envoy Rooms, which was the fastest growing ARR SKU at Envoy in 2022. The backend system supported > 1000 QPS across the developer API, Android tablets, iPads, iOS, Android, analytics, web dashboards, and Microsoft/Google calendar sync workers.
- Head Of Engineering at OfficeTogether - New York, New York, United States (Mar 2021 - Aug 2022): Acquired by Envoy.

- Built a world-class team of engineers with a culture of learning & growth, product velocity, and belonging.
- Led engineering, project management, and (at times) product management.
- Grew the product to 40+ paid companies.
- Achieved a median product "lead time" (feature ideation to first customer) of 14 days (https://medium.com/@willyxiao/how-officetogether-ships-features-in-2-weeks-2b377e253604)
- Tech Lead, News Tab Growth at Facebook - Greater New York City Area (Sep 2018 - Mar 2021): - Grew News Tab from ~10k to ~15mm Daily Active Users in one year.
- Co-led cross-functional News Tab Growth team of 20 people including design, PM, growth-marketing, engineering, data science, and data engineering.
- Data Science & Engineering, Community Integrity at Facebook - London, United Kingdom (Oct 2017 - Sep 2018): - Founded the Actor Experience Data Team, which supported the product team's growth from 5 to 23 people in 10 months. 
- Reduced the number of content takedowns without actor feedback by 25%.
- Founded the Account Integrity Metrics (AIM) team responsible for providing metrics to all account integrity teams.
- Did data analysis, software engineering, and product roadmapping for Community Integrity teams in FB London.
- Software Engineer, App Distribution at Facebook - Greater New York City Area (Aug 2016 - Oct 2017): - Launched an MVP of "Beam," a P2P app-sharing feature on Facebook for Android using Bluetooth LE and Wifi-Direct. Patented.
- Designed and led the creation of the App Upgrade team's measurement framework.
- Served as the interim tech-lead for the engineering team.
- Teaching Assistant, CS50 at Harvard Business School - Cambridge, MA (Sep 2013 - Dec 2015): - Taught sections and reviewed assignments for CS50 (cs50.harvard.edu) for undergraduates and the Harvard Business School.
- Guest-lectured at Harvard Business School in 2019.
- Software Engineer Intern at Facebook - San Francisco Bay Area (Jun 2015 - Aug 2015): - Designed and implemented Facebook's Android notification deduplication framework, resulting in a statistically significant increase in Monthly Active Users (MAU).
- Software Engineer Intern at LiveRamp, An Acxiom Company - San Francisco Bay Area (May 2014 - Aug 2014): - Developed web applications to support customer success managers and investigated a new method of virtualizing development environments.
- Using hadoop and python, analyzed the incremental value of each data partnership and presented findings to the CEO.

## Education
- Harvard University - Joint A.B./A.M., Computer Science, Statistics - (Jan 2012 - Jan 2016): Coursework in computer systems, micro economics, statistics, linear algebra, modern Chinese government, and history.

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao
- https://cognition.com/team-spotlights/willy-xiao
- https://api.github.com/users/willyxiao
- https://x.com/willyxiao1
- https://harvardindependent.com/tag/willy-xiao/
- https://www.thecrimson.com/image/2012/12/11/CS502/
- https://www.scoutingnewsroom.org/scouting-america-welcomes-new-national-executive-board-members/
- https://officetogether.medium.com/officetogether-joins-team-envoy-a-thank-you-from-the-founder-d58c634f2a02
- https://s3.amazonaws.com/tabroom-files/tourns/40242/postings/71921/2026HOTTournamentprogramcompressed.pdf
- https://medium.com/@willyxiao/how-officetogether-ships-features-in-2-weeks-2b377e253604
- https://maxtiply.com/willy-xiao-boy-scout-harvard-facebook-officetogether-envoy-rippling/
- https://medium.com/@willyxiao/i-left-facebook-to-join-a-seed-stage-startup-heres-how-my-life-changed-e170baf19bf
- https://github.com/jonahkall/blockchain-voting
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/willyxiao?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAmnM5YB2HPLZX_q2IK7BgA14bHjatw6TPE
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/cognition-ai-labs/posts
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_my-team-launched-teams-365-mcps-tag-devin-activity-7508678466788179969-jMLD
- https://lnkd.in/gVn_vGef
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_what-comes-to-mind-when-you-think-of-a-great-activity-7496286159837495296-uv6I
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_cognition-has-crossed-1b-in-annualized-revenue-activity-7509293043628429312-paEq
- https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2098123501672841232
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_staff-full-stack-software-engineer-backend-activity-7411520604853596161-G-aW
- https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2107177340786840022
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_maybe-you-never-wanted-to-use-an-ios-app-activity-7511554183318286336-OpZN
- https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2102826645937967327
- https://t.co/7Pek8HYoLQ
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_introducing-devin-plugins-built-on-the-emerging-activity-7503504349608706049-K5s0
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/willyxiao_what-if-your-ai-budget-went-to-the-engineers-activity-7517997105802539008-mfEa
- https://x.com/willyxiao1/status/2105738596640760073
- https://t.co/QS7mPjRMqU


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