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 wrote on X on Thursday. “I had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf. I was ultimately given a payout of only 1% of what my shares would have been worth at the time of the deal.”

Nair said he chose to stay and join Cognition, a former Windsurf competitor that acquired what remained of the startup after a 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.

A person familiar with the Google deal told Business Insider that the talks moved rapidly, necessitating rapid offers for anyone who wished to join the group leaving Windsurf. The person said the swift pace has become commonplace for these types of AI-related deals and the job offers took into account the financial hit Windsurf employees would take by forgoing their shares in the startup.

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 staying on.

“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.