Software Engineer, Developer Productivity 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
You will be a core contributor on the Developer Productivity team, designing and building the systems, tools, and workflows that make every Cursor developer incredibly productive.
Your mission is to create a world-class developer experience inside Cursor: fast builds, intuitive tooling, reliable environments, and seamless CI/CD. You’ll architect, implement, and operate the foundations that power our engineering organization—from local development to global deployments.
You’ll set technical direction within the team, write and review code, and collaborate across engineering to make it effortless for developers to build, test, and ship quickly. Excellence means Cursor engineers feel like they’re working in the best development environment in the world—one so good that parts of it could eventually become external features of Cursor itself.
EXAMPLE PROJECTS INCLUDE
- Building a multi-platform development environment that works seamlessly across macOS, Windows, and Linux.
- Designing and maintaining CI/CD systems—merge queues, build caching, flaky test quarantine, observability, and safe rollout pipelines.
- Automating developer machine provisioning—from laptop setup and reset automation to interview and onboarding workflows.
- Partnering with backend and infrastructure teams to ensure local testing and debugging just work, with near-perfect parity between development and CI environments.
YOU MAY BE A FIT IF
- Have experience working on developer productivity, internal platform, infrastructure, or build/test systems.
- Regularly write and review code, and enjoy improving build systems, scripting CI pipelines, and refining developer tooling.
- Have built or maintained tooling or infrastructure for large-scale or multi-language codebases.
- Care deeply about developer velocity, reliability, and maintainability, and apply sound technical judgment to improve them.
- Are energized by tightening feedback loops and making development feel effortless, fast, and enjoyable.
We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco and Manhattan, New York, replete with well-stocked libraries.
APPLYING
If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach 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