Research Scientist

Cursor; California (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor is building the future of coding by training frontier coding agents and scaling reinforcement learning on real user data. We seek Research Scientists who can own ambitious, end-to-end RL research in a small, talent-dense team dedicated to truth-seeking and creative exploration.

Expect greater scope and autonomy than typical labs. You will drive hypotheses, design experiments, assemble training/eval pipelines, and push breakthroughs into the next model while maintaining a strong focus on

Qualifications

• Deep background in reinforcement learning (RL) and strong machine learning fundamentals.
• Excellent programming and software engineering skills.
• Ability to tackle ambiguous research tasks with minimal guidance.
• Care about data quality and ability to dive into data when appropriate.
• Truth-seeking, focused on scientific understanding over proving ideas.

Responsibilities

• Own ambiguous, hard research problems end-to-end: form hypotheses, design experiments, build training/eval/data pipelines, and push results forward.
• Improve RL methods for longer horizon tasks and efficient training.
• Train graders to improve performance on coding tasks with non-verifiable reward.
• Improve the quality and difficulty of datapoints used for model training.
• Develop real-time RL approaches for coding agents.

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.

Research Scientist

Cursor 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

We're looking for Research Scientists who can drive effective RL or mid-training research in a small-team setting. You'll own ambiguous, hard research problems end-to-end: forming hypotheses, designing experiments, building the training/eval/data needed to test them, and pushing results into the next model. You should expect significantly more scope and autonomy than in other research labs.

What you'll do

• Improve our understanding of RL, what it takes to handle longer horizon tasks, and train with less compute
• Train graders to improve performance on coding tasks with non-verifiable reward
• Improve the quality and difficulty of datapoints we use for training our models
• Realtime RL for coding agents

You may be a fit if

• You have a deep background in RL and strong machine learning fundamentals
• You're an excellent programmer and software engineer
• You can handle ambiguous research tasks with little guidance
• You care a lot about data quality, and can dive into the data when appropriate
• You are truth seeking, aiming to learn more about the science than proving your ideas are correct.

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