Technical Sourcer

cursor; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Cursor is seeking an engineering sourcer to manage sourcing strategies for various technical roles. This position involves maintaining talent maps and finding passive candidates through communities and research.

The ideal candidate will have significant experience in technical recruiting, be data-literate, and possess strong organizational skills to thrive in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering sourcing or research recruiting experience.
• Ability to analyze GitHub profiles and research papers.
• Strong intuition about where great engineers live online.

Responsibilities

• Own sourcing strategy for engineering and research roles.
• Build and maintain talent maps of the best engineers.
• Find passive candidates through various technical communities.

Skills

Sourcing strategy

Technical recruiting

Data literacy

Curiosity

Organizational skills

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.

What you'll do

• Own sourcing strategy for engineering and research roles across the stack, systems, ML, infrastructure, security, and beyond

• Build and maintain deep talent maps of the best engineers in our key hiring areas

• Find people who aren't looking: identify passive candidates through technical communities, papers, open source contributions, and original research

• Write outreach that engineers actually respond to, specific, credible, and genuinely interesting

• Partner with hiring managers and recruiters to understand what we're actually looking for, then go find it

• Track pipeline data to continuously sharpen sourcing precision over volume

• Help Cursor show up in the right places — technical communities, conferences, and conversations that matter to the people we want to hire

Who you are

• 3+ years of eng sourcing or research-focused recruiting experience for technical roles, ideally at a fast-moving startup

• You can read a GitHub profile, skim a research paper, or parse an engineering blog and understand what makes someone exceptional, not just experienced

• You have strong intuitions about where great engineers live online and how to reach them in ways that feel human

• You're a precise operator: organized, data-literate, and good at using signal to cut noise

• You default to curiosity. You ask why something matters, not just what it is

• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in an environment that moves fast and changes direction

Bonus points

• Experience sourcing for AI, compiler, or systems roles

• You've built sourcing programs or pipelines from scratch, not just inherited them

• You have a personal network inside research or open source communities

Location

In-office, ideally San Francisco or New York.