Software Engineer, ML Research

Cursor; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor is seeking a Research Engineer in New York to develop cutting-edge training and inference systems for coding agents. The role involves collaborating directly with researchers to expedite progress through efficient infrastructure.

Ideal candidates have strong backgrounds in distributed systems and a passion for machine learning. You'll be responsible for architecting systems that leverage user data for effective training, ensuring a vital part of our mission to innovate coding tools.

Responsibilities

• Build distributed training, inference, and RL infrastructure.
• Write libraries for large-scale data jobs.
• Architect systems to convert user data into training data.

Skills

Strong infrastructure/distributed systems background

Ability to architect and ship end-to-end

Intuition about how language models work

Excitement to learn about ML

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 Engineer

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 Engineers to build the training, inference, and data systems behind our frontier coding models. You’ll work directly with researchers to make progress repeatable and iteration fast.

What you’ll do

• Build our distributed training, inference, and RL infrastructure
• Write libraries to simplify how researchers do large-scale data jobs
• Architect the systems that turn Cursor user data into effective training data

You may be a fit if

• You have a strong infrastructure/distributed systems background
• You are able to architect and ship end-to-end with high ownership
• You have strong intuitions about how language models work
• You’re excited to learn more about ML