Forward Deployed Engineer

Cursor; California (MO); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor is seeking Forward Deployed Engineers to embed with customer teams, shipping production-grade Cursor workflows that dramatically improve how software is built. You will identify bottlenecks, design practical solutions, and own them from discovery through launch and post-production support.

You will lead customer-facing discovery conversations, own end-to-end delivery across frontend, backend, infra, or prompts, and push patterns back into the Cursor core to improve reliability and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.
• 2+ years in customer-facing roles with accountability for outcomes.
• Experience building AI-native workflows in production.
• Ability to own end-to-end—frontend, backend, infra, or prompts.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with customer engineers to identify bottlenecks.
• Design and build Cursor-powered workflows for large-scale refactors and migrations.
• Ship a fast first version in days and iterate with rollout plans.
• Own production quality: tracing, metrics, latency, and failure modes.
• Collaborate with Staff+/Platform/Eng leaders and push reusable patterns into Cursor core.

Skills

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Customer-facing

End-to-end ownership

Production reliability

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

Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with customer engineering teams to ship production-grade Cursor workflows that measurably improve how they build software.

You’ll figure out what’s actually slowing a team down, design a practical solution, and own it end-to-end, from first discovery call through launch, iteration, and post-production support. This is not a demo role. You are responsible for systems that work in the real world.

What you’ll do

• Lead discovery with customer engineers to identify the real bottleneck and define clear success metrics
• Design and build Cursor-powered workflows (e.g., large-scale refactors, migrations, PR review loops, incident → fix pipelines, spec → implementation systems)
• Ship a fast first version in days, then harden it into something reliable over weeks with proper rollout plans, monitoring, and iteration based on real usage
• Own production quality: tracing, evals, metrics, debugging model behavior, latency/cost tradeoffs, and failure modes
• Work directly with Staff+/Platform/Eng leaders — going deep in code while also communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results
• Turn what you build into reusable patterns and push improvements back into the core Cursor product

You may be a fit if

• You have 5+ years of experience with software development and coding in Python, Javascript/Typescript
• Experience includes 2+ years in a customer-facing role, leading discovery conversations and being accountable for customer outcomes
• You thrive in ambiguity and can turn fuzzy problems into clear scopes and shipped systems
• You’ve built and owned AI-native workflows in production, not just prototypes, and have debugged real-world model failures
• You build end-to-end - if it needs frontend, backend, infra, or prompt iteration, you’ll own it
• You’ve handled production reliability before (metrics, alerts, safe rollouts, incident response)