---
title: 'Software Engineer, Pretraining Data at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-pretraining-data-cursor-palo-alto-r4g83xzn877z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-10'
---

# Software Engineer, Pretraining Data at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/d06d229f-eb2c-46d7-8e0f-96da5ecaec88

## 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.

## SOFTWARE ENGINEER, PRETRAINING DATA

We're looking for Software Engineers to build the data systems behind our frontier models' initial training. You'll work on large-scale crawling, data platform, and pipeline infrastructure, turning raw dumps into the datasets our models train on, and making iteration with researchers fast and reliable.

## RESPONSIBILITIES:

Data Platform:

- Build the platform that turns raw web, code, multimodal, and acquired data into training-ready datasets for frontier pretraining runs
- Own the pipelines, orchestration, and tooling that make pretraining data iteration fast, reliable, observable, and reproducible at scale
- Create clear signals for data quality, lineage, freshness, and pipeline health so researchers can trust what goes into each run
- Partner with initial training, crawling, data quality, and acquisition teams to turn new data ideas into measurable improvements in loss, evals, and model capability

Data Quality:

- Build and own high-throughput, fully telemetered data pipelines that process frontier-scale data with end-to-end traceability. If something breaks or drifts, your systems will tell us before the training run does
- Train and ship models that classify, rank, filter, clean, and identify data at extreme throughput. These models have to be both accurate and fast enough to sit in the critical path without becoming the bottleneck
- Design and run scaling-ladder experiments on data-mixture, repeatability, and quality depth that turn "this dataset feels good" into hard evidence the training team can trust
- Partner tightly with Data Acquisition to hunt down missing or low-quality sources, and with the training teams to close the loop on what actually moves loss and downstream evals
- Treat data quality as a systems problem and a research problem. You will write performance-critical code one week and design careful experiments the next

Crawling:

- Build and scale the web crawling systems that discover, schedule, fetch, and parse high-quality documents across the open web for initial training
- Improve URL seeding, scoring, and fair host scheduling so crawl capacity lands on the hosts and pages that matter most for model quality
- Raise crawl success and parsing quality, defeating antibot failures, improving extractors, and capturing content we previously could not get cleanly
- Debug and harden complex crawl infrastructure end-to-end for availability, recovery, and ingestion lag, and automate delivery of crawl datasets into the data pipeline
- Work independently (and alongside AI agents) and partner with Data Quality and Data Platform so new coverage shows up as better tokens in training runs

## BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

- Minimum of 3 years of software engineering experience
- Software engineering experience building distributed systems and/or large-scale data infrastructure

## PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

- High-slope engineer who has moved unusually fast (e.g., staff-level ownership within a few years) or brings relevant domain experience
- Able to architect and ship end-to-end with high ownership, debug complex systems independently, and work alongside AI agents
- Strong intuitions about large-scale distributed systems
- Excited to learn how pre-training data shapes model quality, and want the ownership and visibility that comes with building systems that feed frontier training runs

## ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

- Onsite role: must be able to work in person at the Palo Alto office

## COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. Annual Salary: $160,000 - $250,000 USD Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience. Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, which also includes equity, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.

## 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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