Scale Engineer

Software Engineer, Services Platform

Backend Engineer · Senior · Full Time

San FranciscoUSD 180k – 280k1mo ago
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Role

What you'll do.

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.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Internal developer platform architecture

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

  • Workflow orchestration systems

    Extensive 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 infrastructure

    Deep 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 design

    Strong 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 engineering

    Demonstrated 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 equivalent

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

Experience

  • Backend infrastructure engineering

    Minimum 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 experience

    Direct 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 experience

    Track 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

  • Backend development

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

  • System design and architecture

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

  • Infrastructure as Code

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

  • Debugging and troubleshooting

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

  • Communication and collaboration

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

Preferred

  • Temporal experience

    Nice to have

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

  • Kubernetes and container orchestration

    Nice to have

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

  • Service mesh architecture

    Nice to have

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

  • API gateway and protocol design

    Nice to have

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

  • Open source infrastructure projects

    Nice to have

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

  • AI-assisted development workflows

    Nice to have

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

Tech stack

Languages

GoTypeScript/Node.jsPython

Frameworks

TemporalgRPCKubernetes

Databases

PostgreSQLRedis

Tools

DockerCI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)Observability and monitoring (Datadog, Prometheus, ELK)Configuration management tools

Other

Distributed systems conceptsObservability and telemetryDevOps and SRE practices

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 180,000 – 280,000

Equity·Stock options

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.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    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. 02

    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. 03

    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. 04

    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.

Full posting

Original listing.

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.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer, Services Platform at Cursor, you'll build the platform-level primitives that make it hard for product teams to build brittle systems and easy to build resilient ones.

Cursor is scaling fast, hundreds of engineers shipping to millions of developers, and your core focus will be the abstractions that make that sustainable: service provisioning, deploy tooling, workflow orchestration, and defining what it means to own and operate a service at Cursor. You'll work at the intersection of developer experience and production reliability, building the golden pathways that every engineering team runs on.

Example projects include...

  • Establishing durable workflow orchestration as a first-class platform: defining best practices, building shared abstractions, and creating the standard that every team uses for reliable, long-running workflows.

  • Designing a declarative service configuration framework that makes it trivial to provision, deploy, and operate new services, so spinning up a new backend goes from days to minutes.

  • Defining the contract for service ownership: what it means to own a service, how services integrate with Cursor's infrastructure abstractions, and building the service catalogue so incidents get resolved in minutes, not hours.

You may be a fit if

  • You have experience building internal developer platforms, service frameworks, or infrastructure abstractions that other engineers depend on.

  • You've worked extensively with Temporal, durable workflow engines, or similar orchestration systems and have strong opinions on best practices.

  • You care deeply about developer experience. You think about how other engineers interact with your systems and design for simplicity and correctness by default.

  • You have experience with deployment tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or service mesh architectures.

  • You understand the tradeoffs in microservice vs. monolith architectures and can help teams navigate service decomposition pragmatically.

  • You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy shipping production systems that make the entire organization more productive.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.

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