ROLE SPECIFICATION // RWBCTY•ACTIVELY_INTERVIEWINGYC COHORT // YC S22 // ELITE AI

Founding AI Systems & Inference Engineer

Cursor (Anysphere)•WEBSITE•ORIGINAL YC PROFILE•HYBRID• San Francisco, CA (Relocation Sponsored)
YC
Y Combinator Verified IngestionYC S22 // ELITE AI
Direct from Cursor (Anysphere) Founders • Work at a Startup Feed
ORIGINAL YC POST
Mandatory Verified Compensation & Equity Range
Guaranteed Base Salary$200k - $280kUSD / YEAR • RADICAL TRANSPARENCY
Direct Equity Grant0.5% - 1.5%STANDARD 4-YR VEST // 1-YR CLIFF
Anti-Ghosting SLA< 18 HoursHEARTBEAT VERIFIED LIVE
Production Stack Specification
PythonRustCUDAC++PyTorchvLLMTypeScript
The Engineering Mission & Technical Challenges
Cursor is the AI-first code editor used by over 500,000 developers worldwide. We are pushing the limits of developer velocity. Current Technical Challenges & 90-Day Deliverables: • Architect custom streaming token decoders delivering first-token latency under 35ms on massive multi-file AST context. • Implement real-time shadow workspace indexers predicting multi-cursor edits before the user finishes typing. • Optimize local Rust-based vector embeddings running natively on Apple Silicon and Linux NVMe. • Deploy distributed multi-tenant model sharding across our dedicated H100 clusters.
Transparent Interview Roadmap
1
Founding Systems Screen30m

Direct conversation with Michael (CEO) and systems leads on past GPU kernel optimization and editor internals.

2
Real-Time Inference Deep Dive60m

Whiteboard speculative decoding, KV-cache compression, and client-server synchronization under packet loss.

3
Paid 1-Day Trial PR1 Day

Compensated trial ($1,200) shipping an actual feature into our staging editor build.

4
Founding Offer Lock24h

Definitive offer with guaranteed base salary, 0.5% - 1.5% equity grant, and comprehensive health coverage.

APPLICATION PROTOCOL: BUILDER DOSSIER