Software Engineer, Services Platform

Cursor5 days ago

Location

San Francisco

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 180,000 – 280,000

Level

Senior

Role

Backend Engineer

Posted

Jun 28, 2026

Full TimeSenior

The role

Summary

As a Software Engineer, Services Platform at Cursor, you'll architect the foundational platform primitives and abstractions that enable hundreds of engineers to build resilient, scalable systems reliably. Working at the intersection of developer experience and production reliability, you'll design durable workflow orchestration systems, declarative service configuration frameworks, and service ownership standards that reduce deployment time from days to minutes and incident resolution from hours to minutes.

What you'll do

Design and implement workflow orchestration systems: Establish durable workflow orchestration as a first-class platform primitive, defining best practices and building shared abstractions for reliable, long-running workflows that every engineering team can depend on.

Build declarative service configuration framework: Design and implement a declarative configuration framework that abstracts away deployment complexity, enabling teams to provision and deploy new services in minutes rather than days while maintaining safety and correctness.

Define service ownership standards: Establish clear contracts for service ownership, define how services integrate with Cursor's infrastructure abstractions, and build the service catalog to enable rapid incident resolution and operational excellence.

Own platform reliability and developer experience: Work at the intersection of production reliability and developer experience, creating golden pathways and best-practice standards that guide all engineering teams toward building resilient, maintainable systems.

Architect scalable platform abstractions: Build platform-level primitives that make it easy for product teams to build resilient systems and difficult to build brittle ones, supporting Cursor's hypergrowth from hundreds of engineers to millions of end users.

What we look for

Technical

Internal developer platform architectureProven experience designing and building internal developer platforms (IDPs), service frameworks, or infrastructure abstractions that multiple engineering teams depend on in production environments.

Workflow orchestration systemsExtensive hands-on experience with Temporal, Airflow, or similar durable workflow orchestration engines, with strong opinions on scaling patterns, failure handling, and best practices for long-running distributed workflows.

Deployment and CI/CD infrastructureDeep expertise in designing and implementing deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, service mesh architectures (Kubernetes, Istio, etc.), or container orchestration platforms that enable reliable, automated deployments at scale.

Microservice architecture designStrong understanding of microservice vs. monolith architectural tradeoffs, service decomposition patterns, API gateway design, and pragmatic guidance for teams navigating service-oriented architecture transitions.

Production systems and reliability engineeringDemonstrated expertise building and operating production systems at scale, with understanding of observability, monitoring, incident response, and reliability patterns that enable high-performance distributed systems.

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalentBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating strong software engineering fundamentals and problem-solving abilities.

Experience

Backend infrastructure engineeringMinimum 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2-3 years focused on backend infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering at a growth-stage or scaling technology company.

Large-scale systems experienceDirect experience building systems that serve hundreds of internal engineers or millions of end users, giving you practical perspective on scalability challenges and platform design decisions.

Developer tools and experienceTrack record of building tools or abstractions specifically designed for developer productivity, with demonstrated ability to think deeply about how other engineers will interact with your systems.

Skills

Required skills

Backend developmentStrong proficiency in backend development with production experience shipping and maintaining complex distributed systems.

System design and architectureAbility to design scalable, reliable system architectures that balance simplicity, correctness, and operational sustainability.

Infrastructure as CodePractical experience with infrastructure-as-code tools and practices for reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure management.

Debugging and troubleshootingExpert-level ability to diagnose complex distributed system failures and implement effective solutions with minimal disruption.

Communication and collaborationExceptional ability to articulate complex technical concepts, gather requirements from diverse stakeholders, and collaborate effectively across multiple engineering teams.

Nice to have

Temporal experienceHands-on production experience with Temporal or similar durable execution platforms, with understanding of their strengths, limitations, and optimal use cases.

Kubernetes and container orchestrationDeep experience with Kubernetes, container runtimes, and orchestration platforms that power modern cloud-native infrastructure.

Service mesh architectureExperience implementing or operating service mesh technologies like Istio, Linkerd, or Consul for sophisticated traffic management and observability.

API gateway and protocol designExperience designing API gateways, REST/gRPC protocols, or defining interface contracts that enable safe evolution of distributed systems.

Open source infrastructure projectsExperience contributing to or maintaining open source infrastructure projects, demonstrating familiarity with community-driven platform development.

AI-assisted development workflowsFamiliarity with AI-powered development tools and IDE enhancements, relevant to Cursor's mission in the AI-driven developer tooling space.

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 180,000 – 280,000 (annual)

Stock options

Available

Benefits

Work with cutting-edge AI technology

Be part of Cursor's mission to automate coding and revolutionize software development using advanced AI research and engineering in a bleeding-edge technical domain.

Flat organizational structure

Work in a lean, talent-dense organization with minimal hierarchy, where your ideas are heard directly and you have significant influence on product and technical direction.

High-impact platform engineering

Focus on building foundational systems that directly amplify the productivity of hundreds of engineers and enable shipping to millions of developers worldwide.

Scale and growth opportunity

Work on infrastructure and platform challenges at significant scale with the opportunity to grow as Cursor scales from hundreds to thousands of engineers.

Autonomy and technical ownership

Own meaningful platform projects end-to-end with autonomy over technical decisions, architectural approaches, and roadmap prioritization.

Collaboration with exceptional talent

Work alongside truth-seeking, passionate engineers who value spirited technical debate, creative problem-solving, and rapid iteration through shipping.

Interview process

1
Initial screen and qualification — Recruiter or hiring team evaluates your background, infrastructure engineering experience, and technical fit for the platform engineering role through a preliminary conversation.
2
Technical interviews (2-3 rounds) — Short, focused technical discussions covering your experience with workflow orchestration, infrastructure design, system architecture, and past decisions in platform engineering contexts. Expect conversational deep-dives into your most complex projects.
3
Onsite project and team discussions — Full-day onsite at Cursor's San Francisco office where you'll work on a focused infrastructure or platform design project, participate in architecture discussions with the team, and meet key stakeholders to assess cultural and technical alignment.
4
Offer and compensation discussion — If alignment is strong, Cursor will extend an offer with competitive compensation reflecting your experience level, including base salary, equity, and benefits.