--- title: 'Software Engineer, RL Data at Cursor' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-rl-data-cursor-san-francisco-2h81w11pwrd2' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-13' --- # Software Engineer, RL Data at Cursor - **Company:** Cursor - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-12 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/aef8f0e7-37cd-4d6e-96c9-3af72f588bae ## 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. Software Engineer, RL Data ## About the Role The data behind a model shapes it more than almost anything else. On the RL Data team at SpaceXAI, you decide what that data is for our agents: which problems they practice, what world they practice in, and how they're judged. You'll take a weakness, like an agent that gives up on hard bugs or misuses a calendar API, and turn it into training data that fixes it, then show the next model is measurably better. You form hypotheses about why data is helping or misleading the model, build the systems to test them, run ablations, and read the rollouts to find the bug, shortcut or mismatch behind a result. Every flaw you catch, or miss, shows up in what the next Grok models learn. ## What you’ll work on - Turning a capability gap into thousands of verifiable tasks — for example, planting subtle bugs deep in a real project's dependencies for the agent to root-cause. - Building environments that behave like production: real codebases with their real dependencies, and simulations of apps like email, calendar, and docs that match the real ones down to search, errors, and pagination. - Designing graders for open-ended work that separate good solutions from bad without penalizing valid alternatives or rewarding shortcuts. - Building automated checks that catch reward hacking, leaked answers, broken environments, and paths the real product wouldn't allow, before data reaches training. - Scaling from a thousand hand-checked tasks to millions, with filters and judges you can trust in place of a person reading each one You may be a fit if - You have strong software engineering fundamentals, and you've built non-trivial systems in Python: data pipelines, test or eval infrastructure, sandboxes, or backend services. - You have taste for what makes an environment trustworthy: faithful enough that skills transfer, strict enough that shortcuts fail, and simple enough to debug when a result looks wrong. - You are careful and systematic — understanding both aggregate metrics and close reading of raw outputs. - You enjoy turning messy, open-ended problems into repeatable, high-quality data production systems. - RL or ML experience is a plus but not required. We welcome strong engineers who want to do research on what makes models better. 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) ## Other roles at Cursor - [Forward Deployed Engineer - Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-japan-cursor-japan-n2z1ybx7y9p5) — Japan - [Software Engineer, Grok Connectors](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-grok-connectors-cursor-palo-alto-pv3ppqtwpy7r) — Palo Alto, CA - [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-cursor-japan-n78ech7ma68z) — Japan - [Integrated Campaigns, APJ](https://feeny.ai/job/integrated-campaigns-apj-cursor-australia-2yg2rpw5yg3q) — Australia - [Account Executive, Commercial](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-commercial-cursor-new-york-69gea1fmchp5) — New York, NY - [Forward Deployed Engineer - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-emea-cursor-london-f7y1wdx5yrng) — London, United Kingdom - [Senior Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-brand-designer-cursor-san-francisco-vr3c80fb8d10) — San Francisco, CA - [Creator Campaign Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/creator-campaign-manager-cursor-san-francisco-8mvjqj9q6aqr) — San Francisco, CA - [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-cursor-san-francisco-wz5cgex6qx4b) — San Francisco, CA - [Field Marketing Manager, Healthcare / SLED](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-healthcare-sled-cursor-remote-sya2rt0f59ay)