Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference
Role summary
Cursor is seeking a Software Engineer to join their Model Routing & Inference team. This role focuses on building and optimizing the inference platform that powers all AI interactions within the product, ensuring speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness at scale. Responsibilities include developing the inference gateway, implementing intelligent failover mechanisms, and designing traffic management systems like backpressure and admission control. The ideal candidate has deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, particularly in inference serving or real-time data pipelines, and is comfortable reasoning about cost/performance tradeoffs at scale.
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.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer on the Model Routing & Inference team at Cursor, you'll build the inference platform that powers every AI interaction in the product.
This team owns the full inference path: making Cursor's AI faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective at a scale few teams in the world get to operate at. Every agent session, every tab completion, and every chat message flows through your stack.
Example projects include...
Building and evolving our inference gateway, a single abstraction over every provider's API semantics, so model onboarding becomes a config change.
Designing intelligent cross-provider failover so no single provider outage causes user-visible degradation.
Designing routing backpressure and admission control so traffic spikes don't cascade into providers.
You may be a fit if
You have deep experience building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, especially in inference serving, traffic routing, or real-time data pipelines.
You're comfortable reasoning about cost/performance tradeoffs at scale (GPU utilization, provider economics, capacity planning).
You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy shipping production systems that handle millions of requests.
You make good calls in the gray area: weighing reliability, cost, latency, and user experience when there isn't a single "right" answer.
Applying
If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach to schedule 2-3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.
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