Software Engineer, Storage

About the Position

Software Engineer, Storage

San Francisco

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.

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 SpaceXAI can scale to meet explosive demand. You'll design and execute the path to a robust, multi-database topology built for that growth.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Design the next-generation data architecture: evolving our storage layer into a partitioned, resilient topology that keeps pace with SpaceXAI's rapid growth.
• Build 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.
• Define 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.
• Own cache infrastructure end-to-end: reliability, capacity planning, and patterns that let product teams move fast without worrying about cache correctness.

Requirements

• Deep experience with relational databases at scale, especially Postgres, MySQL, or similar OLTP systems.
• Experience tackling database sharding, migration, or decomposition problems in production environments.
• Understanding of the tradeoffs between different storage engines and the ability to help teams make the right choices for their workloads.
• Care about operational excellence: backups, monitoring, query performance, and capacity planning are things you think about proactively.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoyment in building systems that other engineers depend on.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2-3 short technical interviews. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.