Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

Cursor·New York, New York, United States | San Francisco, California, United States·posted 244d ago · last seen 51m ago

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About 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

You will be a core contributor on the Developer Productivity team, designing and building the systems, tools, and workflows that make every Cursor developer incredibly productive.

Your mission is to create a world-class developer experience inside Cursor: fast builds, intuitive tooling, reliable environments, and seamless CI/CD. You’ll architect, implement, and operate the foundations that power our engineering organization—from local development to global deployments.

You’ll set technical direction within the team, write and review code, and collaborate across engineering to make it effortless for developers to build, test, and ship quickly. Excellence means Cursor engineers feel like they’re working in the best development environment in the world—one so good that parts of it could eventually become external features of Cursor itself.

Example Projects Include

  • Building a multi-platform development environment that works seamlessly across macOS, Windows, and Linux.

  • Designing and maintaining CI/CD systems—merge queues, build caching, flaky test quarantine, observability, and safe rollout pipelines.

  • Automating developer machine provisioning—from laptop setup and reset automation to interview and onboarding workflows.

  • Partnering with backend and infrastructure teams to ensure local testing and debugging just work, with near-perfect parity between development and CI environments.

You may be a fit if

  • Have experience working on developer productivity, internal platform, infrastructure, or build/test systems.

  • Regularly write and review code, and enjoy improving build systems, scripting CI pipelines, and refining developer tooling.

  • Have built or maintained tooling or infrastructure for large-scale or multi-language codebases.

  • Care deeply about developer velocity, reliability, and maintainability, and apply sound technical judgment to improve them.

  • Are energized by tightening feedback loops and making development feel effortless, fast, and enjoyable.

We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco and Manhattan, New York, replete with well-stocked libraries.

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

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