Research Scientist

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 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