220K–357K USD / year
Sr. Software Engineer, Pretraining Data
DataOn-site — Palo Alto, CA
Published on 2026-11-11
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About this role
Build and lead large-scale data systems that prepare web, code, multimodal, and acquired data for frontier model pretraining. The role spans data pipelines, data quality, and web crawling, with a focus on reliable iteration and measurable improvements to model performance.
About the company
Cursor builds an AI coding editor and agent workflows that help developers write and ship software faster. It serves software teams looking for tighter AI assistance inside the IDE.
The team
Engineering and Machine Learning
What you'll do
- Build and scale distributed pipelines and orchestration for training-ready datasets.
- Develop systems to classify, rank, deduplicate, filter, and clean data at high throughput.
- Run experiments on data mixtures, sampling, and quality thresholds, and translate findings into production systems.
- Build and optimize web crawling, scheduling, fetching, parsing, and content extraction infrastructure.
- Lead cross-team technical initiatives, guide architecture, and mentor engineers.
What we're looking for
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building distributed systems or large-scale data infrastructure.
- Able to work onsite at the Palo Alto office.
Nice to have
- Strong infrastructure or data platform expertise.
- Experience owning and shipping end-to-end systems and debugging complex systems independently.
- Track record leading cross-team technical projects and mentoring engineers.
- Interest in how pretraining data influences model quality.
Benefits
- Equity
- Medical, vision, and dental coverage
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Short- and long-term disability insurance
- Life insurance