Software Engineer, RL Data

Cursor

$130K — $160K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of software engineering experience
  • Strong coding skills with a focus on clean, efficient code
  • Experience in infrastructure, data, or distributed systems
  • Ability to devise measurable tasks from abstract concepts
  • Desire to analyze real-world data and improve datasets or tools

Responsibilities

  • Design tasks to enhance specific capabilities of coding agents
  • Analyze agent performance data to identify and address failure modes
  • Develop reusable systems for better rewards and cleaner environments
  • Collaborate with research teams to validate dataset effectiveness
  • Iterate on training setups based on evaluation feedback

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge reinforcement learning technology
  • Collaborative environment focused on innovation
  • Chance to impact the future of coding practices
  • Access to professional development resources
  • Flexible working arrangements and team-building activities
Full Job Description
Software Engineer, Reinforcement learning

Cursor is building the future of coding. We train frontier coding agents and scale RL on real user data to make them increasingly effective.

About the role

As a Software Engineer on the RL Data team at Cursor, you'll create the tasks, rewards, and environments that train our coding agents. The team owns the data that goes into training: what the model is asked to do, how we score it, and the setups it learns in.

What you'll do
  • Designing a task set that teaches a specific agent capability, then iterating on it from traces and evals until the model actually gets better.
  • Reading a pile of agent traces, finding a failure mode or a surprising behavior, and building a system that surfaces more of the same.
  • Turning a one-off recipe into something other teams can reuse: better rewards, cleaner environments, tighter data quality.
  • Partnering with research on whether a dataset is actually teaching the thing we think it is.

You may be a fit if
  • You write careful, fast code and have strong software engineering fundamentals.
  • You like setting tasks: breaking a fuzzy capability into something concrete you can measure.
  • You have an infra, data, or distributed systems background. RL experience is a plus, not a requirement.
  • You enjoy looking at messy real-world agent behavior and turning it into a dataset or a tool.

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