1 min lesson
System design & people panels
Say what this means in practice: "System design reflects real architecture decision-making and a people panel reads how you hire, grow and unblock."
Step 1 of 3
For an EM, two rounds carry the most weight. System design reflects real architecture decision-making and a people panel reads how you hire, grow and unblock. Both reward specificity - real decisions and admitted mistakes over polished theory.
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Full explanation
What These Rounds Weigh Hardest
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
The behavioral signals the EM panels probe for, ranked. Anchor every story and design to these.
- Round
- System design
- Likely prompt
- Design auth, webhook delivery or an agent backend with reliability/perf trade-offs
- What strong looks like
- Clarify scale, name the failure modes, defend a concrete bar (SLO, delivery guarantee)
- Round
- People panel
- Likely prompt
- Hiring, performance management, conflict, cross-functional partnership
- What strong looks like
- STAR stories with a real decision, the cost and what you'd do differently
| Round | Likely prompt | What strong looks like |
|---|---|---|
| System design | Design auth, webhook delivery or an agent backend with reliability/perf trade-offs | Clarify scale, name the failure modes, defend a concrete bar (SLO, delivery guarantee) |
| People panel | Hiring, performance management, conflict, cross-functional partnership | STAR stories with a real decision, the cost and what you'd do differently |
The system-design and people rounds are inferred from standard senior-eng loops, not Cursor-confirmed for this exact role.
Expect the design prompt to land squarely in your charter - webhook delivery at high throughput, a multi-tenant auth architecture or the backend orchestrating long-running agent workflows. Drive it like the real job: clarify the scale, sketch the boundaries, then make and defend trade-offs out loud.