ROLE SPECIFICATION // RWBCTY•ACTIVELY_INTERVIEWINGYC COHORT // YC S22 // ELITE AI
Founding AI Systems & Inference Engineer
YC
Y Combinator Verified IngestionYC S22 // ELITE AI
Direct from Cursor (Anysphere) Founders • Work at a Startup Feed
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