Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Engineering · Full-time · San Francisco; New York

Apply

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

About the Role

Cursor ships daily. Every release leaves signals behind: telemetry, prompts, completions, agent runs, sessions. Those signals power model improvement, evals, and experimentation. Data infrastructure is what turns them into something teams can trust.

A lot of systems here started simple so we could move fast. Over time, the constraints change and the “good enough” version becomes the bottleneck. This role owns the full ladder: patch what should be patched, redesign what should be redesigned, ship the replacement, and operate it.

Privacy guarantees are part of correctness. What we can retain and use depends on Privacy Mode and org configuration, and getting that wrong breaks a product promise. We choose work by business impact: what blocks product and model teams today, and what will block them next month.

Sample projects include...

  • A core pipeline started as a pragmatic reuse of infrastructure built for something else. It works, but it cannot guarantee properties downstream consumers now need (for example, point-in-time consistency). You design and ship the replacement while keeping the existing system running.

  • A new product surface ships without instrumentation. You talk to the team, define what needs to be captured, and wire it through before the absence becomes anyone else’s problem.

  • Eval coverage drops. You trace it to an instrumentation gap introduced weeks ago by a product change nobody flagged. You fix the gap, add a contract so it cannot recur, and ship the dashboard that would have caught it earlier.

  • Multiple consumers depend on overlapping data. You design schema evolution and validation so changes in one place do not silently degrade the others.

  • Storage costs rise faster than usage. You decide what is worth keeping, implement retention and compression, and delete what is not.

What we're looking for

We’re looking for someone who has built real systems at scale and cares about correctness, cost, and ergonomics.

Strong signals include:

  • Deep experience with Spark (Databricks or open-source Spark both count)

  • Production experience with Ray Data

  • Hands-on ownership of large data pipelines and storage systems

  • Comfort debugging performance issues across client instrumentation, streaming, storage, and model-facing workflows, as well as, compute, storage, and networking layers

  • Clear thinking about data modeling and long-term maintainability

  • You have good judgment about when to patch and when to rebuild

Nice to have

  • Experience running or scaling ClickHouse

  • Familiarity with dbt, Dagster, or similar orchestration and modeling tools

We're in-person with cozy offices in North Beach, San Francisco and Manhattan, New York, replete with well-stocked libraries.

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


Apply for this role

U.S. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY INFORMATION   (Completion is voluntary and will not subject you to adverse treatment)

Anysphere, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability.

We invite all applicants to voluntarily self-identify their race, ethnicity, and gender. Submission of the information on this form is strictly voluntary and refusal to provide it will not subject you to any adverse treatment. Information obtained will be retained in a confidential file and separate from personnel records. This information may only be used in accordance with the provision of applicable federal laws, executive orders, and regulations. If you want more information about any of the sections, please check with a company representative.

SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF VETERAN STATUS  (Completion is voluntary and will not subject you to adverse treatment)

If you believe that you belong to any of the following categories of protected veterans, please indicate by making the appropriate selection

  • Disabled veteran – A veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military and is entitled to disability compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to disability compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, or was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability

  • Recently separated veteran – A veteran separated during the three-year period beginning on the date of the veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S military, ground, naval, or air service

  • Active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran – A veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge was authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense

  • Armed forces service medal veteran - Armed forces service medal veteran – A veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military ground, naval, or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985 (61 Fed. Reg. 1209).