Role

You will lead a team of engineers building the systems that make Cursor’s desktop experience performant and and stable for millions of developers.

You’ll lead the group responsible for the core architecture of the Cursor client—from build and distribution systems to performance instrumentation and platform abstractions for other teams to build on top of. The work is both deeply technical and foundational to the company’s future. Developers expect near-perfect performance and stability from their trusted tools; your team will make that possible.

Cursor’s client is growing fast, spanning macOS, Windows, and Linux, and serving an increasingly diverse user base of professional engineers across many programming languages and developer ecosystems. You’ll shape the systems that let us ship safely and quickly, while pushing the limits of what’s possible in an AI-driven development environment.

Sample projects could include…

• Building core client infrastructure: shared abstractions, build systems, and observability foundations.

• Partnering with product teams to unlock faster release velocity—shipping updates to users daily.

• Improving reliability and performance: addressing memory leaks, crash stability, and frame-time consistency.

• Designing and maintaining instrumentation for performance and telemetry, including structured logging and profiling pipelines.

• Evaluating native vs. Electron-like stack tradeoffs, guiding the architecture for long-term scalability.

You might be a fit if you…

• Have led engineering teams shipping complex desktop or client-facing software at scale to drive long term outcomes.

• Have deep experience in client infrastructure—performance, build systems, distribution, or observability.

• Are fluent in desktop technologies, from Electron and TypeScript to C++ and native platform APIs.

• Care about performance, reliability, and developer experience, and enjoy working across systems and product layers.

About

We're Anysphere, the team behind Cursor.

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering.

We're a group of engineers and scientists who've built beloved products, created large OSS projects, started at-scale businesses, won olympiad medals, and published significant research (e.g. tmm1, ian, luke, phil, federico, aman, sualeh).

Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truthseeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.

We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco and Manhattan, New York, replete with well-stocked libraries. Our investors include Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, Jeff Dean, John Schulman, and the founders of Stripe and Github.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach to schedule 2-3 interviews. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.