Jared Palmer is a renowned open source engineer, AI builder, and VP of Engineering at Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin, where he is focused on building the future of software engineering with AI. He is also the creator of Kev, a family of tiny open source Jev-like decision models built on Qwen3.5 that developers can train and run on their own hardware.

Palmer graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and began his career at Goldman Sachs before pivoting to software engineering and design. He later ran The Palmer Group, a software development and design studio in New York City.

Palmer is the author of widely adopted open source projects including Turborepo, Formik, Razzle, TSDX, and the Vercel AI SDK, reflecting a consistent pattern of democratizing infrastructure for developers. He also angel invests in early-stage startups he is passionate about.

Palmer founded Turborepo, a high-performance frontend build system acquired by Vercel in late 2021, where he subsequently served as VP of AI and created v0.dev and the AI SDK. He then served as SVP of GitHub and VP of Engineering at Xbox before joining Cognition.

Kev reached over 2,400 GitHub stars within just 5 days of launch and hit the Hacker News front page with 406 points, with the Kev-9B model scoring 0.852 on held-out test data. The project was ported to Qwen3.5 at a total compute cost of roughly $95 in H100 time, underscoring Palmer's ethos of lean, high-impact open source engineering.