Forward Deployed Engineer

at Cursor · Coding AI · San Francisco, CA · Solutions

Role focuses on embedding with customer engineering teams to build and ship production-grade AI-powered workflows using Cursor. This involves identifying bottlenecks, designing solutions, and owning the end-to-end lifecycle including reliability, monitoring, and iteration. The role requires strong engineering skills and experience with AI-native applications in production.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead discovery with customer engineers to identify the real bottleneck and define clear success metrics
  2. Design and build Cursor-powered workflows (e.g., large-scale refactors, migrations, PR review loops, incident → fix pipelines, spec → implementation systems)
  3. Ship a fast first version in days, then harden it into something reliable over weeks with proper rollout plans, monitoring, and iteration based on real usage
  4. Own production quality: tracing, evals, metrics, debugging model behavior, latency/cost tradeoffs, and failure modes
  5. Work directly with Staff+/Platform/Eng leaders — going deep in code while also communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • TypeScript/JavaScript
  • production reliability
  • debugging model failures
  • end-to-end system ownership

Nice to have

  • frontend
  • backend
  • infra

What the JD emphasized

  • ship production-grade Cursor workflows
  • own it end-to-end
  • systems that work in the real world
  • built and owned AI-native workflows in production
  • debugged real-world model failures
  • accountable for customer outcomes
  • own it
  • handled production reliability before

Other signals

  • customer-facing AI workflows
  • production quality
  • end-to-end ownership
Read full job description

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.

Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with customer engineering teams to ship production-grade Cursor workflows that measurably improve how they build software.

You’ll figure out what’s actually slowing a team down, design a practical solution, and own it end-to-end — from first discovery call through launch, iteration, and post-production support. This is not a demo role. You are responsible for systems that work in the real world.

What you’ll do

  • Lead discovery with customer engineers to identify the real bottleneck and define clear success metrics
  • Design and build Cursor-powered workflows (e.g., large-scale refactors, migrations, PR review loops, incident → fix pipelines, spec → implementation systems)
  • Ship a fast first version in days, then harden it into something reliable over weeks with proper rollout plans, monitoring, and iteration based on real usage
  • Own production quality: tracing, evals, metrics, debugging model behavior, latency/cost tradeoffs, and failure modes
  • Work directly with Staff+/Platform/Eng leaders — going deep in code while also communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results
  • Turn what you build into reusable patterns and push improvements back into the core Cursor product

You may be a fit if

  • You thrive in ambiguity and can turn fuzzy problems into clear scopes and shipped systems.
  • You’ve built and owned AI-native workflows in production — not just prototypes — and have debugged real-world model failures
  • You’re comfortable leading discovery conversations and being accountable for customer outcomes
  • You build end-to-end. If it needs frontend, backend, infra, or prompt iteration, you’ll own it
  • You’ve handled production reliability before (metrics, alerts, safe rollouts, incident response)
  • You’re strong in Python and TypeScript/JavaScript and can ramp quickly on new stacks