---
title: 'Manager, Channel & Partners at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-channel-partners-cursor-japan-n77m3q0k2reh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Manager, Channel & Partners at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** Japan
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/de322c3d-337e-4301-a7dc-90ccf331d60f

## 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

Cursor is building its partner ecosystem across APJ, and this is a build-from-the-ground-up role at the centre of it. As the in-market partner builder for your market, you own the partner business end to end. You set the strategy, stand it up, and run it, all at the same time. You work as the business partner to the in-market Regional Vice President, turning their go-to-market priorities into partner-led pipeline and co-sell wins. Two engines drive the market, Technology partnerships and Transformation partnerships, both building on relationships Cursor already holds.

Japan is a partner-first market. You cannot operate effectively without strong local partners, and this is the most pressing of our APJ in-market needs despite being at the earliest stage. This is a standing start: you will land Cursor's first local partners in Japan, open co-sell motions, and stand up FDE capacity in a market with no coverage today.

This is a team of one in-market with a speed mandate. You report into the Director of Partnerships APJ, which keeps the craft and standards under partnerships without splitting your accountability to the market.

This is an in-market role. You will spend a significant share of your time in person with partner principals, delivery teams, and customers across your market, and you will work closely with a small, high-talent-density global partnerships team that values in-person collaboration and fast, direct communication.

## What you'll do

- Own the in-market partner business from concept to completion. Set the market partner strategy and sequencing from greenfield, then execute it personally.
- Accelerate Cursor's global partners into your market and incubate them to productivity, across Technology and Transformation partnerships.
- Where gaps exist, recruit, onboard, and manage local partners from the ground up.
- Build and run co-sell motions, stand up FDE (forward deployed engineer) capacity, and drive C-level access and value-amplification programs through to landed wins.
- Turn partner relationships into qualified pipeline and closed co-sell revenue that feeds the in-market RVP number.
- Build the data picture for your market and use it to drive decisions, priorities, and forecasting.
- Own the operating system that keeps it repeatable: reporting, tracking, tiering, onboarding flows, partner QBRs, and cadence.
- Act as business partner to the in-market RVP, translating their go-to-market priorities into partner motion and giving them a clear, data-backed view of the business.
- Take ambiguous problems, from routes to market and contracting to partner economics, co-sell mechanics, channel conflict, localisation, FDE accreditation, and customer access, and drive them to a working outcome without the path laid out for you.

You may be a fit if

- You are fluent in Japanese and deeply understand the local technology and services partner ecosystem, especially SIs/GSIs. In a partner-first market, this is essential.
- You have professional working proficiency in English. You will engage consistently with HQ and present plans to English-speaking stakeholders, so you can operate and communicate confidently in English. Fluency in both Japanese and English is the highest-value combination for this role.
- You are a builder-operator, a doer rather than a coordinator, energized by owning a business from greenfield and running it as it grows.
- You have built and scaled technology, consulting, GSI, ideally in enterprise software, and carried a number against that work.
- You are fluent across partner business plans, program mechanics, enablement, and co-sell economics, and comfortable being accountable for the outcomes.
- You make decisions from data and can stand up the reporting and operating cadence yourself.
- You build durable relationships with partner principals and alliance leads, the kind of person partners choose to invest behind.
- You navigate negotiation and channel conflict with judgment, and you identify and influence the right internal and external people quickly.
- You operate credibly across diverse markets and decision-making styles, and you move fast.

## 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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