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Cursor

Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference

Cursor is hiring a Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference in New York, 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

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.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Model Routing & Inference team at SpaceXAI, 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.

#LI-DNI

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference at Cursor rates 88 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

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

  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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