About this role

Cursor is hiring a mid-level Software Engineer based in New York City, NY. The posting calls out experience with Distributed Systems, API Development, ETL.

Role: Software Engineer
Function: software engineering
Level: mid
Track: Individual contributor
Employment: Full-time
Location: New York City, NY
Work mode: On-site
Department: Engineering
Posted: Apr 7, 2026

AI Summary

Build the inference platform powering Cursor's AI interactions, owning the full inference path from gateway abstraction to cross-provider failover and traffic routing. Requires deep experience with high-throughput distributed systems, inference serving, and cost/performance tradeoffs at scale.

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Job description

from Cursor careers

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.

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