Software Engineer, Model Routing & Inference

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Model Routing & Inference team, 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.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, especially in inference serving, traffic routing, or real-time data pipelines.
• Comfortable reasoning about cost/performance tradeoffs at scale (GPU utilization, provider economics, capacity planning).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoyment of shipping production systems that handle millions of requests.
• Ability to make good calls in the gray area: weighing reliability, cost, latency, and user experience when there isn't a single "right" answer.

Interview Process

• 2–3 short technical interviews.
• Onsite interview in the office: work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.