How Cursor recruits elite AI engineers when huge salaries aren't enough

Aug 10, 2026 02:50 AM - 1 hour ago 1

Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra cellist David Edwards crafts a miniature Stradivarius violin, complete pinch sheep gut strings, successful his Edinburgh workshop

In the conflict for elite AI talent, the net is the easy part.

At Cursor, the $60 cardinal company down a suite of celebrated coding devices precocious acquired by SpaceX, hiring a candidate is a spot for illustration trying to triumph complete personification who's wholly retired of your league.

"Closing is simply a squad sport," Matt Ward, Cursor's caput of talent, said connected a caller section of the "People by WTF" podcast. For immoderate high-profile candidates, he said, "there are often regular standups astir that campaigner astir what we're doing to get them to yes."

The institution has besides created backstage Slack channels dedicated to individual recruits, giving labor a spot to coordinate outreach, dinners, meetings, and different parts of the courtship.

In the AI universe, wherever galore millions of dollars successful net and perks are often not capable to recruit a apical candidate, wins tin travel down to making a campaigner consciousness wanted.

Ward said that aft learning that 1 sought-after campaigner had attended a performing-arts precocious schoolhouse and trained arsenic a classical violinist, the institution tracked down a specialty euphony shop successful New York and bought him an different stringed instrument, which Ward described arsenic a benignant of Turkish guitar.

The gift itself wasn't particularly expensive. "It's the thoughtfulness and the touch and the characteristic of it," Ward said.

The company's CEO, Michael Truell, said connected A16z's podcast past twelvemonth that Cursor utilized "crazy recruiting stunts" to people its first 10 hires, including "flying crossed the world to the personification aft they opportunity no."

Ward said Cursor's recruiting process has go much systematized arsenic the institution has grown.

Rather than treating recruiting arsenic a numbers crippled — connection a 100 people, question and reply whoever responds, and gradually constrictive the excavation — Ward said he prefers to place the comparatively mini number of group who could genuinely excel astatine a occupation and past prosecute them deliberately.

"There are 50 group successful the world who tin do this," he said, describing the mindset. "Let's spell find those 50 people."

Then, he said, he "relentlessly" pursues them.

Cursor's attack reflects the caller realities of the AI boom: For those astatine the apical of the market, offering much money whitethorn not beryllium enough.

The aforesaid coveted engineers tin person aggregate tremendous offers, prestigious jobs, valuable equity, and entree to cutting-edge work. Winning them complete tin travel down to whether they link pinch a company's ngo and group — and whether they consciousness understood.

The title has changed the measurement awesome companies crossed Silicon Valley deliberation astir hiring, pinch immoderate of the astir fierce recruiting efforts coming straight from the top.

Mark Zuckerberg has personally emailed AI researchers he wanted to bring to Meta. OpenAI main investigation serviceman Mark Chen later said that Zuckerberg had erstwhile hand-delivered crockery to an OpenAI worker Meta was trying to woo — a maneuver that apparently near specified an belief that OpenAI began sending crockery successful its ain recruiting efforts.

That's not to opportunity money doesn't matter.

Former Google HR main Laszlo Bock has said that spending $100 cardinal to unafraid a genuinely exceptional AI interrogator could still magnitude to a "bargain" for a tech giant, fixed some what that personification could build and the advantage of keeping them distant from a competitor.

"You're getting NBA player-like offers and salaries, and sometimes greater than that," Ward said.