
Software Engineer, RL Data at Cursor (San Francisco, CA)
Cursor· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time
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, Reinforcement learning
- SpaceXAI is building the future of coding. We train frontier coding agents and scale RL on real user data to make them increasingly effective.
About the role
- As a Software Engineer on the RL Data team at SpaceXAI, you'll create the tasks, rewards, and environments that train our coding agents. The team owns the data that goes into training: what the model is asked to do, how we score it, and the setups it learns in.
What you’ll do
- Designing a task set that teaches a specific agent capability, then iterating on it from traces and evals until the model actually gets better.
- Reading a pile of agent traces, finding a failure mode or a surprising behavior, and building a system that surfaces more of the same.
- Turning a one-off recipe into something other teams can reuse: better rewards, cleaner environments, tighter data quality.
- Partnering with research on whether a dataset is actually teaching the thing we think it is.
You may be a fit if
- You write careful, fast code and have strong software engineering fundamentals.
- You like setting tasks: breaking a fuzzy capability into something concrete you can measure.
- You have an infra, data, or distributed systems background. RL experience is a plus, not a requirement.
- You enjoy looking at messy real-world agent behavior and turning it into a dataset or a tool.
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