Job Overview
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.
What you'll do • Own sourcing strategy for engineering and research roles across the stack, systems, ML, infrastructure, security, and beyond
• Build and maintain deep talent maps of the best engineers in our key hiring areas
• Find people who aren't looking: identify passive candidates through technical communities, papers, open source contributions, and original research
• Write outreach that engineers actually respond to, specific, credible, and genuinely interesting
• Partner with hiring managers and recruiters to understand what we're actually looking for, then go find it
• Track pipeline data to continuously sharpen sourcing precision over volume
• Help Cursor show up in the right places — technical communities, conferences, and conversations that matter to the people we want to hire
Who you are • 3+ years of eng sourcing or research-focused recruiting experience for technical roles, ideally at a fast-moving startup
• You can read a GitHub profile, skim a research paper, or parse an engineering blog and understand what makes someone exceptional, not just experienced
• You have strong intuitions about where great engineers live online and how to reach them in ways that feel human
• You're a precise operator: organized, data-literate, and good at using signal to cut noise
• You default to curiosity. You ask why something matters, not just what it is
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in an environment that moves fast and changes direction
Bonus points • Experience sourcing for AI, compiler, or systems roles
• You've built sourcing programs or pipelines from scratch, not just inherited them
• You have a personal network inside research or open source communities
Location In-office, ideally San Francisco or New York.