Design Engineer

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.

Cursor is building the future of coding. Our AI code editor and agents are just the beginning – we're solving the hardest engineering and design problems in AI automating coding, and making these capabilities accessible to everyone.

About the role

We're looking for a design engineer who lives at the intersection of design and code. You'll work directly with the founding team to prototype, build, and polish the experiences that make Cursor magical. This role is perfect for someone who thinks like a designer but builds like an engineer – or vice versa.

What you'll do

• Build production-quality UI components and interactions that delight users

• Rapidly prototype new concepts and features to validate ideas before full implementation

• Bridge the gap between design and engineering – translating designs into code and pushing design through technical innovation

• Own the quality of UI implementation across the product, ensuring pixel-perfect execution and smooth interactions

• Collaborate with designers and engineers to define what's possible and push the boundaries of the product

• Contribute to design systems and component libraries that enable the team to ship faster

You might be a fit if

• You're equally comfortable in Figma and your code editor

• You have strong front-end engineering skills (TypeScript, React, SolidJS, CSS, animations)

• You have an eye for design details and care deeply about craft

• You've shipped polished products and know what it takes to get from 90% to 100%

• You can move fast – prototyping ideas in hours, not days

• You think in systems and can build reusable, maintainable UI components

• You're excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms

Nice to have

• Experience building developer tools or technical products

• Background in design or formal design training

• Experience with Electron, native UI frameworks, or building cross-platform apps

• Understanding of code editors, IDEs, or programming environments