---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Core Services at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-core-services-cursor-san-francisco-9d8yrcwrnk9m'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Engineering Manager, Core Services at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/e5d8ed7a-b93d-464f-a8d1-a4fa60e808d5

## Job description

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

You will lead the Core Services team at Cursor, owning the critical shared services that sit between our product surfaces and the infrastructure layer: auth, webhooks, and the backend systems that power agent workflows. Cursor is redefining how developers write code, and your team is what makes that possible at scale. You'll build and operate the systems that every product team depends on, ensuring they are reliable, well-abstracted, and ready for whatever comes next.

You'll set technical direction for authentication, SCM integrations, webhook infrastructure, and end-to-end agent reliability, driving the quality of the services layer that the entire company builds on top of. You'll lead a small, high-impact team, write and review code, and partner closely with product and infrastructure teams to ensure Cursor's backend is rock-solid.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Owning authentication: designing and implementing a scalable auth architecture that secures one of the most widely-used developer tools in the world.
- Powering the agent backend: owning the infrastructure behind Cursor's agent workflows, optimizing for end-to-end performance and reliability as agents become central to the developer experience.
- Building a robust webhook server: handling high-throughput event delivery with proper retry semantics, dead-letter queues, and observability so external integrations just work.
- Hardening SCM integrations: building resilient abstractions over source control providers so Cursor stays rock-solid regardless of third-party conditions.
- Driving end-to-end agent reliability: partnering with the client and inference teams to improve the full path from user action to agent response.
- Hiring and growing the team: sourcing, interviewing, and closing top backend and services talent, while developing your engineers through coaching, mentorship, and high-leverage project assignments.

## YOU MAY BE A FIT IF

- You have led engineering teams building and operating critical backend services, especially auth systems, API gateways, or webhook infrastructure.
- You've worked on distributed systems and have strong opinions on reliability and performance of complex multi-step systems.
- You care deeply about clean abstractions, well-defined service contracts, and making it easy for other engineers to build on top of your work.
- You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy owning the full lifecycle of production services.
- Experience with authentication/authorization frameworks (OAuth, JWTs, RBAC), event-driven architectures, or building developer-facing platform services is a plus.

## #LI-DNI

## About Cursor

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cursor is an AI coding agent and software development environment that enables developers to build, test, and ship software using natural-language instructions and autonomous agents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (pending acquisition by SpaceX/xAI)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence, developer tools, software development
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprise, SMB, individual developers); trusted by over half of the Fortune 500
- **Mission/purpose**: To build the future of software development and help engineers "engineer anything"

## Products & Services
- **Cursor (AI Coding Agent)**: The flagship product — an AI-powered code editor and agent that searches codebases, edits files, runs terminal commands, and completes multi-step programming tasks from natural-language instructions. Available as a desktop IDE, web app, mobile app (iOS), and CLI.
- **Bugbot**: A code-review tool integrated with GitHub pull requests that autonomously detects bugs and issues.
- **Composer Models**: A family of proprietary agentic coding models (Composer, Composer 1.5, Composer 2, Composer 2.5) trained with reinforcement learning for long-running coding tasks.
- **Cursor Automations**: Always-on agents that run on schedules or triggers to build, maintain, and fix software.
- **Cloud Agents**: Agents that run in their own cloud environments to build, test, and demo features end-to-end.
- **Graphite**: A separate product acquired by Cursor (formerly a stack-based Git workflow tool).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $29.3 billion (Series D, November 2025); pending acquisition by SpaceX/xAI at $60 billion (announced June 16, 2026)
- **Key Metric**: $3 billion+ Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as of May 2026
- **Notable Investors**: Accel, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, OpenAI Startup Fund, Google, Nvidia; angel investors include Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO) and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co-founder)
- **Growth Signals**: Crossed $100M ARR in Jan 2025, $500M ARR by June 2025, $1B ARR by Nov 2025, and $3B ARR by May 2026. Headcount grew from ~300 (2025) to 579 (mid-2026). Expanding into mobile, Jira integration, and enterprise features.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary coding models (Composer series)** trained with reinforcement learning specifically for software development tasks — a deep technical moat
- **Complete codebase understanding** at any scale, enabling agents to work contextually across large, complex codebases
- **Multi-model flexibility**: Integrates models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, and their own models, letting users choose the best tool per task
- **Agentic infrastructure**: Agents that run autonomously, in parallel, and across environments (terminal, Slack, GitHub, Jira, cloud)
- **Massive adoption**: Trusted by over half the Fortune 500 and millions of developers — strong network effects and brand lock-in

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling agentic capabilities**: Moving from assisted coding to fully autonomous software development agents
- **Enterprise expansion**: Building admin controls, SSO, compliance features, and usage analytics for large organizations
- **Platform ecosystem**: Expanding into adjacent tools (Jira, Slack, GitHub, mobile) to embed agents everywhere developers work
- **Model research**: Continued investment in training frontier coding models with reinforcement learning and synthetic data
- **Post-acquisition integration with xAI**: Leveraging SpaceX/xAI compute and infrastructure for even larger models

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven research environment**: Cursor describes itself as "an applied research team focused on building the future of software development" — a rare blend of R&D and product engineering
- **Talent density**: The company "obsesses over talent to an unusual degree" and designs itself as "a haven for self-motivated individual contributors"
- **Rapid growth trajectory**: From 0 to $3B ARR in ~4 years — employees work on products used by millions and see massive scale
- **Compensation**: Competitive for AI/engineering talent; top-of-market salaries and equity in a high-valuation private company
- **Work policy**: Mix of in-office (San Francisco, New York) and remote roles; many engineering roles are on-site
- **Engineering culture**: Two-day on-site final interviews with the core team; no AI tools allowed in first-round coding interviews — they value raw problem-solving
- **Team composition**: 579 employees with strong talent density from Stripe, Figma, Notion, Vercel, Graphite, Slack, Rubrik, and Plaid
- **Recent departures to**: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS — alumni are highly sought after

## Sources
1. [cursor.com](https://cursor.com)
2. [cursor.com/careers](https://cursor.com/careers)
3. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cursorai)
4. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(company))
5. [JobsByCulture](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-cursor-2026)

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