1 min lesson
How to prepare per stage
Explain the practical rule behind "Use this stage map to decide what evidence belongs in each round."
Step 1 of 3
Map your prep directly to the stages so nothing surprises you. The loop rewards a few repeatable assets - drilled SQL, a rehearsed end-to-end design and three portfolio stories - far more than broad cramming.
Use this stage map to decide what evidence belongs in each round. Memorizing the order is the shallow version. For every stage, prepare one artifact, one story and one question that shows how you reason in the role.
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Advanced table
Stage
- Stage
- Recruiter / HM
- Prep
- Sharpen “why data platform at Cursor”
- Asset to walk in with
- 90-sec billions/day story, one number
- Stage
- First tech screen
- Prep
- Drill SQL/Python without AI
- Asset to walk in with
- Window functions, dedup/CDC, idempotent transforms cold
- Stage
- Later tech screens
- Prep
- Practice disciplined AI use
- Asset to walk in with
- Lookup-only habit, narrated trade-offs
- Stage
- Take-home
- Prep
- Build a small production-grade pipeline
- Asset to walk in with
- Idempotent + incremental template, README pattern
- Stage
- Onsite project
- Prep
- Timebox a demoable slice repeatedly
- Asset to walk in with
- An 8-hour scoping muscle + trade-off doc
- Stage
- Design deep dive
- Prep
- Rehearse ingestion → lakehouse → orchestration → serving aloud
- Asset to walk in with
- A reference architecture with budgets
- Stage
- Values round
- Prep
- Map ownership/ambiguity/intensity stories
- Asset to walk in with
- Three behavioral stories ready to tell
| Stage | Prep | Asset to walk in with |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter / HM | Sharpen “why data platform at Cursor” | 90-sec billions/day story, one number |
| First tech screen | Drill SQL/Python without AI | Window functions, dedup/CDC, idempotent transforms cold |
| Later tech screens | Practice disciplined AI use | Lookup-only habit, narrated trade-offs |
| Take-home | Build a small production-grade pipeline | Idempotent + incremental template, README pattern |
| Onsite project | Timebox a demoable slice repeatedly | An 8-hour scoping muscle + trade-off doc |
| Design deep dive | Rehearse ingestion → lakehouse → orchestration → serving aloud | A reference architecture with budgets |
| Values round | Map ownership/ambiguity/intensity stories | Three behavioral stories ready to tell |
The single highest-impact drill is the live first screen. Practice SQL and Python without leaning on AI so the autocomplete-only round feels normal, not jarring.
Three portfolio stories to pre-build
- Ingestion-scaling win
- A time you scaled a pipeline toward billions of events/day - the bottleneck, the fix, the number.
- Cost-optimization win
- A storage-layout, compaction or compute-right-sizing change with the dollars or percentage saved.
- Reliability / observability win
- An SLA/SLO, freshness or lineage system you built and the incident it prevented or caught.
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Optional practice