Research Scientist
Cursor is hiring a Research Scientist in San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Cursor.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this research scientist role: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Grok.
- Level lists 125 other open roles at Cursor.
AI in this role
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars.
SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.
Research Scientist
SpaceXAI is building the future of coding. We train frontier coding agents and scale RL on real user data to make them increasingly effective.
About the role
We’re looking for Research Scientists who can drive effective RL or mid-training research in a small-team setting. You’ll own ambiguous, hard research problems end-to-end: forming hypotheses, designing experiments, building the training/eval/data needed to test them, and pushing results into the next model. You should expect significantly more scope and autonomy than in other research labs.
What you’ll do
Improve our understanding of RL, what it takes to handle longer horizon tasks, and train with less compute
Train graders to improve performance on coding tasks with non-verifiable reward
Improve the quality and difficulty of datapoints we use for training our models
Realtime RL for coding agents
You may be a fit if
You have a deep background in RL and strong machine learning fundamentals
You’re an excellent programmer and software engineer
You can handle ambiguous research tasks with little guidance
You care a lot about data quality, and can dive into the data when appropriate
You are truth seeking, aiming to learn more about the science than proving your ideas are correct.
#LI-DNI
How we rate this
Research Scientist at Cursor rates 97 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in research scientist jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical research scientist job
- $192k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical research scientist figure when pay comes up. See research scientist jobs
Questions you could be asked
- What's a project where you used Grok hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Grok. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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