Senior Model Engineer (AI)

Location: Onsite in Palo Alto, California; must be able to work in person at the Palo Alto office

Annual salary: $220,000–$357,000 USD

Company

Cursor AI builds super-intelligence systems, including frontier coding agents, large-scale models, and related applications.

What you will do

• Design and run rigorous experiments that turn research ideas into measurable gains in model capability.
• Improve data recipes through data quality work, deduplication, and mixture experiments.
• Define effective reinforcement-learning data and rewards, including grader design and reward-hacking prevention.
• Advance training science through architecture, scaling, and post-training experiments for coding and computer-use agents.
• Build evaluations and targeted tasks that expose model weaknesses and guide research priorities.
• Partner with engineers to move promising results from small experiments into frontier-scale training runs.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on experience training or post-training large neural networks with 1B+ parameters, including pre-training, fine-tuning, or reinforcement-learning methods such as RLHF or DPO.
• Production-quality programming experience in Python, PyTorch, JAX, Rust, or C++.
• Ability to handle ambiguous research tasks with little guidance and own a research direction end to end.
• Strong background in reinforcement learning and machine-learning fundamentals.
• Experience with RL algorithms for language models, scaling laws, or RL environments and evaluations.
• Experience with distributed training at scale, including debugging issues that appear only at scale; frontier-scale model training experience is preferred.
• Excellent programming and software-engineering skills across the research stack, especially Python and PyTorch or JAX.
• A track record of original machine-learning work, demonstrated through research, open source, or production impact.
• MS or PhD in computer science, machine learning, mathematics, physics, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Small-team research environment with end-to-end ownership of difficult, ambiguous problems.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Equity and access to a 401(k) retirement plan.
• Short- and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, discounts, and other benefits.