Engineering Manager

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.

About the role

Cursor’s agents work inside the codebases of some of the most security-conscious engineering organizations in the world — holding credentials, reading untrusted content, running tools, and shipping changes. Today they act on authority delegated per task. Where we’re headed, they’ll work more like coworkers: autonomous over long horizons, holding standing responsibilities, initiating work, and collaborating with people and other agents. The security models that future needs — identity and accountability for autonomous workers, standing authority rather than per-task permission, agent-to-agent trust, oversight that scales with always-on autonomy — mostly don’t exist yet.

What you’ll do

• Chart the path from supervised agents to trusted autonomous ones: define the security primitives that enable agent autonomy, and lead the team that builds them.
• Engineer the isolation that makes Cursor safe to run inside customers’ most valuable codebases: tenancy, workspace, secret, and data protections designed for real adversaries.
• Build the authority infrastructure autonomous agents need: identity, scoped permissions, policy enforcement, and secure tool execution, so an agent can hold real responsibility with verifiable limits and full accountability.
• Build customer-facing security controls that are understandable, usable, and strong enough for Cursor’s most security-sensitive customers, with crisp success metrics for security outcomes.
• Hire, coach, and grow a high-performing security engineering team while staying technically close to the work: write and review code where useful, and keep execution fast and technically grounded.

You may be a fit if

• You’ve led engineering teams shipping production systems with high security, reliability, or platform stakes — and you want a problem space where much of the answer isn’t written down yet.
• You have strong product and systems judgment: you can reason from user workflows to architecture, threat models, enforcement points, and operational tradeoffs — and you see security as something that enables product capability, not only restricts it.
• You understand modern application security, authorization, tenancy, identity, secrets, data isolation, and secure-by-default platform design.
• You have good instincts about AI agents: how they use tools, where authority should come from, how prompt injection and exfiltration show up in practice, and how to build mitigations that hold up against creative adversaries.
• You’re comfortable operating in ambiguity: you can set strategy where precedent is thin, commit to a direction, and stay close enough to the implementation to know when to change it.
• You can partner well across product, infrastructure, ML, and customer-facing teams.

#LI-DNI