Research Scientist

cursor· Engineering
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📍 New York📍 San FranciscoFullTime

About this role

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.

Research Scientist

Cursor is building the future of coding. We train frontier coding agents and scale RL on real user data to make them increasingly effective.

About the role

We’re looking for Research Scientists who can drive effective RL or mid-training research in a small-team setting. You’ll own ambiguous, hard research problems end-to-end: forming hypotheses, designing experiments, building the training/eval/data needed to test them, and pushing results into the next model. You should expect significantly more scope and autonomy than in other research labs.

What you’ll do

  • Improve our understanding of RL, what it takes to handle longer horizon tasks, and train with less compute

  • Train graders to improve performance on coding tasks with non-verifiable reward

  • Improve the quality and difficulty of datapoints we use for training our models

  • Realtime RL for coding agents

You may be a fit if

  • You have a deep background in RL and strong machine learning fundamentals

  • You’re an excellent programmer and software engineer

  • You can handle ambiguous research tasks with little guidance

  • You care a lot about data quality, and can dive into the data when appropriate

  • You are truth seeking, aiming to learn more about the science than proving your ideas are correct.

#LI-DNI

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the salary disclosed for the Research Scientist position at cursor?
The salary for this Research Scientist role at cursor is not publicly listed. Click "Apply Now" to learn more about the compensation package on their official careers page.
Where is the Research Scientist position at cursor located?
This Research Scientist role at cursor is based in New York, San Francisco. The position is listed as on-site or hybrid. Check the full job description or apply directly to confirm the work arrangement.
Is the Research Scientist role at cursor full-time or part-time?
This is listed as a FullTime position. It is posted as a Research Scientist role in the Engineering department at cursor.
Which team or department does the Research Scientist at cursor belong to?
This Research Scientist position is part of the Engineering department at cursor. See the full job description for more information about the team structure and responsibilities.
How do I apply for the Research Scientist position at cursor?
Click the "Apply Now" button on this page. You will be redirected to cursor's official application portal hosted on ashby where you can submit your application directly.
When was the Research Scientist job at cursor posted?
This Research Scientist position at cursor was posted on Jan 27, 2026. Apply as soon as possible — early applications are often reviewed first.
Research Scientist
cursor
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