Research Scientist

Cursor (Anysphere)
San Francisco / New York2026-01-27OnSite

About the job

We’re looking for Research Scientists who can drive effective RL or mid-training research in a small-team setting. You’ll own ambiguous, hard research problems end-to-end: forming hypotheses, designing experiments, building the training/eval/data needed to test them, and pushing results into the next model. You should expect significantly more scope and autonomy than in other research labs.

Responsibilities

- Improve our understanding of RL, what it takes to handle longer horizon tasks, and train with less compute

- Train graders to improve performance on coding tasks with non-verifiable reward

- Improve the quality and difficulty of datapoints we use for training our models

- Realtime RL https://cursor.com/blog/tab-rl for coding agents

Qualifications

Minimum

No minimum qualifications listed.

Preferred

- You have a deep background in RL and strong machine learning fundamentals

- You’re an excellent programmer and software engineer

- You can handle ambiguous research tasks with little guidance

- You care a lot about data quality, and can dive into the data when appropriate

- You are truth seeking, aiming to learn more about the science than proving your ideas are correct.