Forward Deployed Engineer
Cursor·New York, New York, United States | United States | San Francisco, California, United States·posted 154d ago · last seen 22m agoTrack this application
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Get Started FreeAbout interviewing at Cursor
Short and fast: a recruiter screen, then '2-3 short technicals' (Cursor's own job-posting wording), then the signature round — an onsite in their office where you build a real project. CEO Michael Truell has said every engineering and design hire spends two days in-office working on a project: you get a desk, a laptop, a choice of three projects, and a frozen older copy of the real codebase with the dev environment set up, then present what you built. Crucially, first technical screens BAN AI beyond autocomplete ('programming without AI is still a really great time-boxed test for skill and intelligence' — Truell), while the onsite expects you to work with full tooling including Cursor itself. There is no formal behavioral round — the 4-6 meals with the team during the trial are the culture interview. Decisions come fast; the whole loop targets weeks, not months.
Read the full Cursor interview process →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)
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