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Software Engineer, ML Platform

Cursor is hiring a Software Engineer, ML Platform in Palo Alto, United States. It pays $140k-$225k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Cursor.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • The posting mentions Grok among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as a senior role.
  • Cursor has 120 other open roles on Level.
  • Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

Grok

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.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER, ML PLATFORM

As a Software Engineer on ML Platform at SpaceXSI, you'll build the infrastructure that turns real product usage into better models, and keeps research moving fast on large GPU fleets. ML Platform is organized into four teams. Depending on your background, you may join any of them. We're looking for strong distributed-systems and infrastructure engineers who want to sit next to research and ship platform primitives that move the product.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design, build, and operate core platform systems used daily by ML researchers and product engineers

  • Partner closely with research to turn recurring pain into durable infrastructure

  • Own reliability, performance, and developer experience for the systems in your lane

  • Ship iteratively in a flat, high-ownership environment. Measure impact, then raise the bar

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in computer science, machine learning, or another quantitative discipline; OR equivalent work experience

  • 5+ years of industry experience working with production distributed systems (e.g., infrastructure, ingestion, data pipelines, or scheduling/orchestration, etc.)

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

  • Experience owning production distributed systems at meaningful scale (ingestion, data pipelines, scheduling/orchestration, or similar)

  • Experience partnering and building platforms for ML researchers and product engineers

  • Thrive where ownership is high and the feedback loop is short

  • Telemetry: event ingestion, product analytics pipelines, OpenTelemetry / tracing, reliable data APIs

  • Product Data Platform: data frameworks, Spark / Flink / Ray, ML dataset and training-data infrastructure

  • Observability: experiment / run monitoring, debug and eval tooling, agent-friendly observability UX

  • ML DevX and Systems: GPU / cluster scheduling, job queues, node health, research compute developer experience

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

  • We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Manhattan, New York, complete with well-stocked libraries

  • If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out 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

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary:

$140,000 - $225,000 USD

Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge and skills, education, and experience.

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package at SpaceXSI, which also includes equity, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, ML Platform at Cursor rates 92 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.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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

Grok

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$140k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts 16% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. What's a project where you used Grok hands-on?
  2. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  3. 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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