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.