--- title: 'Software Engineer, ML Platform at Cursor' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ml-platform-cursor-san-francisco-3qyw2n9477p1' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-08' --- # Software Engineer, ML Platform at Cursor - **Company:** Cursor - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-31 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/167f0e93-6915-4d56-803a-be89d1441fb5 ## 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 ML Platform at Cursor, 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. 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