The role in one paragraph

You design and run studies that tell Cursor what developers want, need and love in an AI coding tool and you turn that into insight the roadmap actually moves on.

Read this section as the role contract. The diagram or table names the surface area, but the interview signal is whether you can turn it into a clear operating claim: what you own, what you do not own, what evidence proves the work is working and where judgment matters.

Cursor is the AI code editor built by Anysphere, used daily by a large base of professional developers. The JD frames the job around one outcome: learn what those users want, need and love and guide the company's tradeoffs with that knowledge. This is a senior individual-contributor craft role at the 5–8+ years mark. You are not a manager and you are not a junior research assistant who takes notes while someone else owns the question.

The other non-negotiable is method breadth. This is a mixed-methods seat, so interviews alone won't carry it. The expectation is qualitative work combined with product analytics, surveys and experiments, woven into one story rather than four separate reports.