Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference

Cursor; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor is hiring a Software Engineer for the Model Routing & Inference team. You will build the inference platform that powers every AI interaction in the product, handling every agent session, tab completion, and chat message through the stack.

You will design high-throughput, low-latency systems, reason about cost/performance tradeoffs at scale, and ship production software that supports millions of requests. You'll collaborate across research and engineering to continuously improve the system.

Qualifications

• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
• Experience with inference serving and model routing.
• Ability to optimize GPU utilization and provider economics.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production systems experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the inference platform powering AI interactions.
• Improve throughput, latency, and reliability at scale.
• Implement cross-provider routing and failover.
• Collaborate with research, product, and engineering teams on architecture.

Skills

Distributed systems

Inference serving

Traffic routing

Real-time data

Cost optimization

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

As a Software Engineer on the Model Routing & Inference team at Cursor, you'll build the inference platform that powers every AI interaction in the product.

This team owns the full inference path: making Cursor's AI faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective at a scale few teams in the world get to operate at. Every agent session, every tab completion, and every chat message flows through your stack.

Example projects include...

• Building and evolving our inference gateway, a single abstraction over every provider's API semantics, so model onboarding becomes a config change.
• Designing intelligent cross-provider failover so no single provider outage causes user-visible degradation.
• Designing routing backpressure and admission control so traffic spikes don't cascade into providers.

You may be a fit if

• You have deep experience building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, especially in inference serving, traffic routing, or real-time data pipelines.
• You're comfortable reasoning about cost/performance tradeoffs at scale (GPU utilization, provider economics, capacity planning).
• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy shipping production systems that handle millions of requests.
• You make good calls in the gray area: weighing reliability, cost, latency, and user experience when there isn't a single "right" answer.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.

#LI-DNI