---
title: 'Software Engineer, RL Data at Cursor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-rl-data-cursor-san-francisco-tq27ch79rdap'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-22'
---

# Software Engineer, RL Data at Cursor

- **Company:** Cursor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-22
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/9a175381-45e2-42b6-bd64-6c84532365f9

## 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.

## 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

- [Account Executive, Geo Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-geo-enterprise-cursor-austin-j591j6zjcp5g) — Austin, TX
- [Regional Director, Geo Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/regional-director-geo-enterprise-cursor-austin-j5ga0s5p4ghk) — Austin, TX
- [AI Deployment Manager - Singapore](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-deployment-manager-singapore-cursor-singapore-2000tvrghpft) — Singapore
- [Sales Development Representative - Dutch speaking](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-dutch-speaking-cursor-london-y93n8qz1j2ff) — London, United Kingdom
- [Sales Development Representative - ANZ](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-anz-cursor-australia-sfh545btanca) — Australia
- [Software Engineer, RL Environments](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-rl-environments-cursor-san-francisco-0e21b716ks9m) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer, Research Tools](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-research-tools-cursor-san-francisco-s2ppfez1z3bn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/field-engineer-cursor-remote-frcthqne32vf)
- [Strategic Account Executive, Life Sciences](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-account-executive-life-sciences-cursor-remote-8z2ydb40nq1q)
- [Deal Desk Analyst - Americas](https://feeny.ai/job/deal-desk-analyst-americas-cursor-san-francisco-90dgjsn6dw2v) — San Francisco, CA