Cursor

Software Engineer, RL Data

San Francisco, CA, United States · On-site · FullTime

Apply on the employer’s site ↗See how well you match this job

You apply directly with the employer. ROLIVA does not submit applications from this page and is not the employer.

About the role

Description from the employer’s posting. Check the employer’s page for the current version.

  • EmployerCursor
  • LocationSan Francisco, CA, United States
  • Work styleOn-site
  • Employment typeFullTime
  • Employer posted

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.

Software Engineer, RL Data

About the Role

The data behind a model shapes it more than almost anything else. On the RL Data team at SpaceXAI, you decide what that data is for our agents: which problems they practice, what world they practice in, and how they're judged. You'll take a weakness, like an agent that gives up on hard bugs or misuses a calendar API, and turn it into training data that fixes it, then show the next model is measurably better.

You form hypotheses about why data is helping or misleading the model, build the systems to test them, run ablations, and read the rollouts to find the bug, shortcut or mismatch behind a result. Every flaw you catch, or miss, shows up in what the next Grok models learn.

Show full description

What you’ll work on

Turning a capability gap into thousands of verifiable tasks — for example, planting subtle bugs deep in a real project's dependencies for the agent to root-cause.

Building environments that behave like production: real codebases with their real dependencies, and simulations of apps like email, calendar, and docs that match the real ones down to search, errors, and pagination.

Designing graders for open-ended work that separate good solutions from bad without penalizing valid alternatives or rewarding shortcuts.

Building automated checks that catch reward hacking, leaked answers, broken environments, and paths the real product wouldn't allow, before data reaches training.

Scaling from a thousand hand-checked tasks to millions, with filters and judges you can trust in place of a person reading each one

You may be a fit if

You have strong software engineering fundamentals, and you've built non-trivial systems in Python: data pipelines, test or eval infrastructure, sandboxes, or backend services.

You have taste for what makes an environment trustworthy: faithful enough that skills transfer, strict enough that shortcuts fail, and simple enough to debug when a result looks wrong.

You are careful and systematic — understanding both aggregate metrics and close reading of raw outputs.

You enjoy turning messy, open-ended problems into repeatable, high-quality data production systems.

RL or ML experience is a plus but not required. We welcome strong engineers who want to do research on what makes models better.

Applying

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.

Staying safe while you apply

  • Never pay to apply, interview or accept an offer. ROLIVA never asks you for payment to apply to a job.
  • Apply only through the official “Apply on the employer’s site” button, on the employer’s own site, and check that a recruiter’s email uses that employer’s own domain rather than a free email address.
  • Be cautious of an offer made with no real interview, or pressure to decide quickly or share financial details early.

Does something look wrong with this listing? Use “Report broken link” in the role details, or read ROLIVA’s full job-safety guidance ↗.

Preparing for this role with ROLIVA

  • Check the fit.

    Compare the requirements with the experience you have confirmed, including gaps.

  • Prepare honestly.

    Build interview stories and application drafts from your own evidence.

  • Keep track.

    Save the role and record your own application status and follow-ups.

Create a free workspace or log in.

Software engineer jobs in San Francisco

ROLIVA currently lists 233 open roles like this in San Francisco.

Employers hiring for this

  • Harvey34 open roles
  • Cursor22 open roles
  • Notion16 open roles
  • Hinge Health15 open roles
  • Lambda14 open roles

Top skills asked for

Listings whose description mentions each term. A mention is not a requirement.

Advertised salary for this role here

These are advertised ranges, not what people are paid.

  • USD a year, after annualising120,000–465,000 (112 listings, 18 employers)

At a glance

  • Work styleOn-site
  • Employment typeFullTime
  • Employer posted
  • Added to ROLIVA
  • Last checked

Skills in this posting

Skills ROLIVA found in the employer’s own description above. A mention is not a requirement.

Python

Explore similar roles

Similar jobs

Furtherai

Staff Product Engineer

San Francisco, California, United States

On-siteFullTimeUSD 250,000–400,000/year

Episode Six

Software Engineer

Chennai, India

Work style not stated