Windsurf Engineer Details Exploding Google Offer

Those job offers flying left and right in the heat of the AI talent wars? They sometimes have a lit fuse attached.

Prem Qu Nair, an early software engineer at Windsurf, said Google gave him an exploding job offer to join its DeepMind lab during its recent hiring blitz at the AI coding startup. In his case, Nair said he only had hours to consider Google’s offer or it would be taken off the table.

“I was employee #2 at Windsurf and have worked on AI+code for years,” Nair wrote on X on Thursday.

“I was given an offer that would explode same day,” Nair said.

A person familiar with the matter said Prem was initially part of the group of Windsurf employees who accepted offers from Google. The person said that the employees were required to forfeit their shares if they accepted. The talks moved quickly, necessitating rapid offers, which took into account the financial hit the Windsurf employees would take by forgoing their shares, they added.

“I had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf,” Nair wrote on X. “I was ultimately given a payout of only 1% of what my shares would have been worth at the time of the deal. In going to Cognition, I’ve chosen a different direction.”

Cognition, a former Windsurf competitor, acquired what remained of the startup after Windsurf’s reported $3 billion acquisition deal with OpenAI fell apart and Google DeepMind swooped in to hire away its CEO and other top executives, all in a matter of days earlier this month.

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Nair said in his social media post that he’s excited for Cognition’s future.

“For someone who loves software engineering, Cognition feels like home,” he wrote. “It reminds me of the energy of the earliest days of Windsurf, where we wrote excessive amounts of code and had excessive amounts of fun.”

A spokesperson for Windsurf said it was “thrilled” Nair was at the company.

“As one of the early minds of Windsurf, we are thrilled to have Prem and his great expertise working alongside us again at Cognition,” Windsurf spokesperson Payal Patel said in a statement to BI.

Google is far from the only company making aggressive talent plays for AI engineers and researchers. Silicon Valley is awash in lucrative offers this summer as Big Tech companies try to hire away everyone from startup CEOs to engineers and researchers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta has offered up to $100 million compensation packages in an attempt to poach its AI researchers. Meta later said OpenAI often countered those offers. Anthropic cofounder Benjamin Mann said his firm has been “less affected” by Meta’s poaching efforts than others.

Meta kicked off the recruiting spree in June when it hired Scale CEO Alexandr Wang as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company.