
Software Engineer, Core Services at Cursor (San Francisco, CA)
Cursor· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
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
As a Software Engineer on the Core Services team at Cursor, you'll own 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 work is what makes that possible at scale. You'll build the systems that every product team depends on, ensuring they are reliable, well-abstracted, and ready for whatever comes next.
EXAMPLE PROJECTS INCLUDE...
- 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, closing the loop on one of the hardest problems in AI-powered development.
YOU MAY BE A FIT IF
- You have experience building and operating critical backend services, especially auth systems, API gateways, or webhook infrastructure.
- You've worked on agentic products or infrastructure 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.
APPLYING
If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.
Why work at Cursor
- 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