Software Engineer, RL Environments
Cursor is hiring a Software Engineer, RL Environments 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 software engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Grok, Python and APIs.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 124 other open roles at Cursor.
AI in this role
Build scalable platforms and systems that turn real-world data into reinforcement learning training environments for Grok models.
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
One of our north stars is a future where teams can hire Grok as a remote colleague. Reaching that future requires training our models in realistic, diverse environments that support complex, end-to-end work across domains.
As a Software Engineer on the RL Environments team at SpaceXAI, you’ll build the systems that turn real-world data into high-quality environments and tasks for reinforcement learning. You’ll create dramatically more realistic training environments while owning the shared platforms and quality layers that help us produce trustworthy data quickly and at scale.
This role sits at the intersection of research, data, and engineering. You’ll work closely with ML Platform and research teams to turn company data, Grok Bot interactions, vendor-built tasks, tutor data, acquired data, and synthetic data into training-ready environments. Your work will make high-quality RL data easier to create, validate, discover, and use across our model-training efforts.
What you’ll work on
Building platforms that allows us to build complex, realistic, and diverse RL environments at scale, that support end-to-end tasks across knowledge-work domains.
Designing end-to-end factory that turns massive raw data into useful and realistic environments.
Defining and applying consistent quality standards across vendor, tutor, acquired, and synthetic data.
Creating self-serve APIs and tooling that accelerate task and environment development for internal teams and external contributors.
Partnering across research, platform, and external teams to translate model-capability goals into effective training tasks and environments.
You may be a fit if
You have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with data platforms, developer tools, distributed systems, or ML infrastructure.
You can turn ambiguous quality standards into concrete, automated checks.
You’re comfortable building repeatable pipelines from messy, heterogeneous data.
You care about model behavior and can translate capability goals into tasks and experiments.
You collaborate well across disciplines and own open-ended problems end to end.
Applying
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.
How we rate this
Software Engineer, RL Environments at Cursor rates 90 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
- $167k
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
- Tell me about a project where reinforcement learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where data pipelines was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used Grok in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Reinforcement learning, Software Engineering, Machine learning, Data Pipelines, and 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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