---
title: 'Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Public Sector at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/regional-director-forward-deployed-engineering-public-sector-cursor-washington-48scvtcdhnwc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-03'
---

# Regional Director, Forward Deployed Engineering - Public Sector at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** Washington, DC
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-03
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/7d6611cb-28bf-4277-8758-178154466934

## Job description

SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.

## About the role

Our Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) don't advise from the sidelines. They embed with customer teams, build production-grade AI coding workflows alongside them, and leave behind habits that keep paying off after the engagement ends. As Regional Director, you'll lead and scale this team across our most important public sector customers, own engagements from technical discovery through delivery, and build the partner track that extends this work through GSIs and consulting firms. Success is measured by what's different in a customer's org at day 30, not by what got shipped.

## Responsibilities

- Build and lead a team of FDEs in your region: hire, set clear technical performance standards and career paths, and coach the team on scoping and delivery of FDE engagements
- Own scoping for PubSec FDE projects: run discovery and architecture reviews, surface integration and infrastructure constraints, and turn ambiguous customer problems into time-boxed proposals with clear ROI for six- and seven-figure engagements.
- Hold the delivery quality bar across your team's engagements: tight scoping, milestone tracking, technical standards, and clean handoffs to customer engineering teams.
- Serve as executive technical sponsor and primary customer point of contact on your region's highest-priority engagements, owning delivery and the relationship from IC engineers to the C-suite, and stepping in directly where the stakes are highest.
- Generate product feedback loop with Product and Engineering with enough detail to drive roadmap decisions, and turn what works into reusable solutions and product surface areas for all customers.
- Contribute to the launch and scaling of the PupSec partner FDE track: train and enable GSI and consulting partners, and hold them to the same quality bar as the in-house team.

## Basic Qualifications

- Experience directly managing a team of engineers who build and ship production software
- Professional software development experience in Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript
- Experience building and deploying AI-powered workflows in production environments

## Preferred Skills and Experience

- U.S. citizenship required. Active security clearance (Public Trust, Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI) or ability to obtain one.
- Leadership experience in forward deployed engineering, data science, machine learning engineering or software engineers
- Debugging model failures in production AI systems
- Scoping six- and seven-figure technical engagements with Sales and presenting them to C-suite and engineering leadership buyers
- Enabling GSI or consulting partners to deliver technical engagements

## 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)

## Other roles at Cursor

- [Customer Success Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-strategy-operations-manager-cursor-san-francisco-j0gsbcatbr8q) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Deployment Manager - Australia](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-deployment-manager-australia-cursor-australia-npvrrmcq3gmp) — Australia
- [Solutions Architect - Australia](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-australia-cursor-australia-7zb7qherp0fa) — Australia
- [Solutions Strategy & Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-strategy-operations-manager-cursor-san-francisco-472wbsaq2d7q) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Deployment Manager - Singapore](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-deployment-manager-singapore-cursor-singapore-2000tvrghpft) — Singapore
- [Solutions Architect - Western Europe](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-western-europe-cursor-london-yz442nr2218j) — London, United Kingdom
- [Data Engineer, Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/data-engineer-marketing-cursor-san-francisco-t9pnr904fj2g) — San Francisco, CA
- [Partner Account Manager - Singapore](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-account-manager-singapore-cursor-singapore-bag2cx92v66r) — Singapore
- [Software Engineer, Compute Infra](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-compute-infra-cursor-san-francisco-6198mmy6r5d9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Engineer, Commercial](https://feeny.ai/job/field-engineer-commercial-cursor-australia-bqhgjqm2y6nx) — Australia