2 min lesson
FDE vs Solutions Engineer
Choose the best answer to "Which statement best captures the Cursor FDE charter?" Then say what led you there.
Step 1 of 3
This is explicitly not a demo or pre-sales role. If you describe FDE work as "showing customers what Cursor can do," you've described the wrong job. You own systems that run in production against real source code.
FDE sits at the seam between elite customer-facing delivery and product engineering. A refactor pattern that works at one bank often generalizes, so the strongest FDEs turn their customer wins into reusable parts of core Cursor. Your delivery work becomes product roadmap.
Core SWE builds Cursor itself with no customer in the loop.
FDE lives in the customer's codebase and constraints.
Field/support keeps deployments healthy.
FDE creates net-new AI-native workflows and owns the outcome.
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
The sharpest contrast: pre-sales demos vs. building and owning the real system.