Marketing Manager, Startup Events & Programs

Marketing · Full-time · San Francisco

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

As our Marketing Manager, Startup Events and Community, you'll be the growth engine behind Cursor for Startups, responsible for turning our startup strategy into high-impact programs that win the right early-stage companies, help founders get deeper value from Cursor, and turn our strongest founder-users into advocates.

This is a builder role for someone who's energized by the founder and startup community. We're building a focused program across top Seed–Series B startups, reaching them directly and through VC and accelerator ecosystems.

You'll design the strategy for the events, community moments, and hackathons that create genuine advocacy and deeper product usage and make decisions about where we should show up and where we shouldn’t. If you want to be in and create the rooms with founders building the future, this is the role for you.

What You'll Do

Program Architecture & Segment Ownership

• Design the startup events playbook: Build and execute a data-driven marketing plan for the startup segment, focused on landing and growing usage within top Seed–Series B companies across YC and the broader ecosystem.
• Own the founder funnel and footprint: Deploy a mix of founder events, hackathons, executive/founder roundtables, and community activations to acquire the right startups and drive them toward meaningful success using Cursor.
• Build ecosystem relationships: Partner with VCs, accelerators, and other startup partners to reach their portfolio founders through growth programs, content, and co-hosted moments. Help identify which partners are worth going deep with.
• Creativity: Fearlessly break the standard playbook by avoiding generic engagement formats - find out how founders actually build and gather and design around that.
• Founder advocacy: Surface and amplify founder/customer stories worth telling, and feature them in our events. Become a trusted partner and peer to the founders using Cursor.

Measurement & Operational Excellence

• Event orchestration: Own programs end to end, from ideation and promotion toonsite experience and follow-up. Keep it scrappy and high-signal; obsess over the details that make founders feel Cursor cares about them early.
• Data-driven iteration: Track spend against real outcomes (activation, usage, retention, advocacy), not vanity metrics. Manage your budget toward the highest-impact investments and deprioritize what isn't working.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• GTM partnership: Work closely with the Events, Growth, PMM, and Field Engineering teams. Bring FEs into events to help founders build real automations, align on which startups show strong usage signals, and flag when a company is genuinely ready for an Enterprise conversation.
• Product and marketing partnership: Be the "eyes and ears" of the founder community. Feed real-time insights on messaging resonance, credits/billing confusion, feature awareness, and competitive shifts back to Product and Marketing.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience in or with startups: You have 4–7+ years in field, community, event, growth, or revenue marketing, ideally in B2B SaaS or developer tools. You understand founders and early-stage engineering teams, and how they buy, build, and talk to each other.
• Builder mindset: You're a self-starter who can build a program from scratch and then obsessively optimize it based on data.
• Community obsession: You genuinely like being around founders and builders, and you know the difference between a program that feels authentic to that community and one that feels like a vendor hard sell.
• Storytelling: Your communication is sharp, credible, and founder-native. You can hold your own in a room full of technical founders.

Role Specifics

• Field presence: Ability to travel (~20%) to host events, support hackathons, and connect with founders in-region.
• Event craft: Experience producing standout events, from intimate founder dinners to high-energy hackathons, that people actually want to attend.
• Location: In-office role based out of our San Francisco office.