What are the responsibilities and job description for the Forward Deployed Engineer position at Cursor?
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
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
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 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
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 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