CursorSoftware Engineer, Storage
1w ago
USAdatabasescachingdata architecturequery optimization
Software Engineer responsible for designing and executing the data storage architecture for scalable, reliable backend systems.
Responsibilities
- As a Software Engineer on the Storage team at Cursor, you'll own the data layer that underpins every product surface: the databases, caches, and the strategy for how teams provision, query, and scale their data stores.
- Millions of developers depend on Cursor every day, and the future of our storage architecture is one of the highest-leverage problems at the company: get it right, and every team ships faster, every product surface gets more reliable, and Cursor can scale to meet explosive demand. You'll design and execute the path to a robust, multi-database topology built for that growth.
Other
- 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.
- Designing the next-generation data architecture: evolving our storage layer into a partitioned, resilient topology that keeps pace with Cursor's rapid growth.
- Building query attribution and guardrails: instrumenting every database query by service, catching bad patterns before they hit production, and making it impossible to ship problematic queries without review.
- Defining the "when to use what" strategy for data stores: creating clear guidance and golden pathways so every team picks the right engine for their workload without second-guessing.
- Owning cache infrastructure end-to-end: reliability, capacity planning, and patterns that let product teams move fast without worrying about cache correctness.
- You have deep experience with relational databases at scale, especially Postgres, MySQL, or similar OLTP systems.
- You've tackled database sharding, migration, or decomposition problems in production environments.
- You understand the tradeoffs between different storage engines and can help teams make the right choices for their workloads.
- You care about operational excellence: backups, monitoring, query performance, and capacity planning are things you think about proactively.
- You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy building systems that other engineers depend on.
- If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out 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.
- #LI-DNI