User Researcher

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 We’re looking for a User Researcher to join our growing research function. This person will help us better understand our users, uncover opportunities across the product, and partner closely with product, design, engineering, and data to guide Cursor’s roadmap. What you'll do - Lead high-impact research: Design and run studies that help us understand what users want, need, and love across different segments, workflows, and levels of expertise. Use methods like interviews, usability testing, surveys, and lightweight experiments to uncover pain points, motivations, and opportunities. - Accelerate product learning: Help teams quickly test hypotheses, evaluate ideas, and gather feedback on features and experiences. Choose the right level of rigor for the question, from scrappy directional research to deeper strategic work. - Connect insights to product decisions: Combine qualitative research with analytics, surveys, experiments, and data science partnerships to build a holistic view of our users. Translate findings into clear, actionable insights that shape product direction, strategy, and prioritization. - Help scale research at Cursor: Contribute to the systems, processes, templates, and rituals that make research easier to run and more impactful across the company. Advocate for user needs and ensure they are represented in product decisions. What We're Looking For - Experience: 5–8+ years in user research in fast-moving, technical product environments. - Strong research craft: Deep command of qualitative and quantitative research methods. - Product intuition: Ability to connect user insights to product decisions, tradeoffs, and strategy. - Scrappy operator: Comfortable working in ambiguity, moving quickly, and adapting research methods to different levels of urgency, constraint, and rigor — finding creative ways to get useful signal quickly without over- or under-investing. - Clear communicator: Exceptional ability to synthesize research into concise, compelling, and actionable insights. - Collaborative partner: Excited to work closely with product, design, engineering, and data teams to shape what we build.