Research Scientist
Cursor
| Company | Cursor |
| Category | Science & Research |
| Location | San Francisco |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Not stated |
| Salary | Not stated by the employer |
| Posted | 27 Jan 2026 |
| Last verified | 30 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (ashby) |
Description
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 https://cursor.com/blog/composer 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 https://cursor.com/blog/tab-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
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