Walden Yan
Co-Founder at Cognition
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWalden Yan is a founder and engineer with nine years of experience building AI-enabled products and security tooling from research prototypes to startups in San Francisco. An IOI gold medalist and MIT PRIMES researcher, he blends deep algorithmic chops and cryptography/ML research with practical systems work—shipping projects like Cursor and leading program-verification efforts at DeepReason. He has repeatedly scaled teams and product delivery, from managing a 14-person agency that was acquired to co-founding early-stage ventures and an AI-focused startup, Cognition. Walden studies both how things should be done optimally and how they get done in the real world, bringing a designer’s sense for elegant solutions together with founder-level execution.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Avon High SchoolBachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Harvard University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (37)
z310
react-wrapper9
textinput9
autocomplete7
blockchain7
react7
language-model7
vue6
ai6
profiling6
nextjs6
javascript6
artificial-intelligence6
profiler5
smart-contracts5
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
walnutwaldo/Programming_Contests
Jul 2017 - Dec 2022
All of my stuff pertaining to programming contests and preparing for them
Contributions:806 commits, 2 PRs, 769 pushes in 5 years 5 months
walnutwaldo/Personal-Site
Oct 2021 - Mar 2026
waldenyan.com
Contributions:1 review, 3 PRs, 38 pushes in 4 years 6 months
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