Forward Deployed Engineer

About Cursor and the Role

Cursor is dedicated to automating coding, aiming to create the premier tool for professional developers by combining innovative research, design, and engineering efforts. The company prides itself on a flat organizational structure with a compact, highly talented team that values truth-seeking, creativity, and passionate problem-solving. The culture encourages lively debate, inventive ideas, and delivering functional software swiftly.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work directly alongside customer engineering teams to develop and deploy production-ready Cursor workflows that significantly enhance their software development processes. This position involves identifying impediments in their workflow, designing effective solutions, and owning the project from the initial discovery conversation through to deployment, iteration, and ongoing support. This role demands practical, real-world impact rather than demonstration projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead discovery discussions with customer engineers to uncover the true bottlenecks and establish measurable success criteria.
• Design and implement Cursor-driven workflows, such as large refactors, migrations, pull request review cycles, incident resolution pipelines, and specification-to-implementation systems.
• Deliver a rapid initial version within days, then progressively solidify it into a dependable system over weeks, with thorough rollout plans, monitoring, and iterative improvements based on live usage data.
• Maintain production-level quality by overseeing tracing, evaluations, metrics, debugging model behaviors, managing latency and cost trade-offs, and addressing failure modes.
• Collaborate closely with senior engineering leadership, balancing deep code engagement with clear communication about trade-offs and outcomes.
• Convert developed solutions into reusable patterns and contribute enhancements back to the core Cursor product.

Candidate Profile

• Thrives amid ambiguity and can transform undefined problems into clearly scoped and successfully delivered systems.
• Has experience building and owning AI-powered workflows in production environments rather than just prototypes and has hands-on experience debugging real-world AI model failures.
• Confident leading discovery conversations with customers and accountable for delivering tangible outcomes.
• Adept at end-to-end development including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and prompt iteration.
• Experienced in maintaining production system reliability, including metrics monitoring, alerting, safe rollout procedures, and incident response.
• Proficient in Python and TypeScript/JavaScript with the ability to rapidly learn new technology stacks.