Software Engineer, ML Research
Cursor is hiring a Software Engineer, ML Research in San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Cursor.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions Grok among its tools and skills.
- Cursor has 125 other open roles on Level.
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.
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 Engineers to build the training, inference, and data systems behind our frontier coding models. You’ll work directly with researchers to make progress repeatable and iteration fast.
What you’ll do
Build our distributed training, inference, and RL infrastructure
Write libraries to simplify how researchers do large-scale data jobs
Architect the systems that turn Cursor user data into effective training data
You may be a fit if
You have a strong infrastructure/distributed systems background
You are able to architect and ship end-to-end with high ownership
You have strong intuitions about how language models work
You’re excited to learn more about ML
#LI-DNI
How we rate this
Software Engineer, ML Research at Cursor rates 96 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
Pay
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer 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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