---
title: 'Software Engineer, ML Platform at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ml-platform-cursor-palo-alto-3qyw2n9477p1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-27'
---

# Software Engineer, ML Platform at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-27
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/167f0e93-6915-4d56-803a-be89d1441fb5

## 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

As a Software Engineer on ML Platform at SpaceXAI, you'll build the infrastructure that turns real product usage into better models — and keeps research moving fast on large GPU fleets. ML Platform is organized into four teams. Depending on your background, you may join any of them:

- Telemetry — Own the collection and serving path that turns real product use into a record research can trust; without slowing the product, and under a small, explicit policy. Client-side or high-volume ingestion experience is a plus.
- ML Data Platform — Build the shared environments and pipeline substrate researchers extend, so new experiments don’t fork their own stack.
- Observability — Make it easy for researchers to start, watch, and debug their own runs.
- ML DevX and Systems — Shorten the path from idea to a trusted run on the research fleet.

We're looking for strong distributed-systems and infrastructure engineers who want to sit next to research and ship platform primitives that move the product.

We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Manhattan, New York, complete with well-stocked libraries.

## What you’ll do

- Design, build, and operate core platform systems used daily by ML researchers and product engineers
- Partner closely with research to turn recurring pain into durable infrastructure
- Own reliability, performance, and developer experience for the systems in your lane
- Ship iteratively in a flat, high-ownership environment. Measure impact, then raise the bar

You may be a fit if

- You have a strong background in systems / infrastructure software engineering and enjoy building platforms other engineers depend on
- You've owned production distributed systems at meaningful scale (ingestion, data pipelines, scheduling/orchestration, or similar)
- You're comfortable across Linux, cloud and/or bare metal, and modern orchestration (Kubernetes, Ray, or equivalent)
- You like working closely with ML researchers and product engineers
- You thrive where ownership is high and the feedback loop is short

Especially strong backgrounds by team

- Telemetry: event ingestion, product analytics pipelines, OpenTelemetry / tracing, reliable data APIs
- Product Data Platform: data frameworks, Spark / Flink / Ray, ML dataset and training-data infrastructure
- Observability: experiment / run monitoring, debug and eval tooling, agent-friendly observability UX
- ML DevX and Systems: GPU / cluster scheduling, job queues, node health, research compute developer experience

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.

## 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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