1 min lesson
Map the role precisely so you don't blur it
Name the parts in "Map the role precisely so you don't blur it" and give the practical job of each one.
Step 1 of 2
Map the role precisely so you don't blur it
FDE is not these adjacent roles
- Not pre-sales
- You build and ship production workflows, not demos that close a deal
- Not core SWE
- You deliver inside the customer, against their bottleneck, on their timeline
- Not consulting
- Successful patterns feed back into the Cursor product; you're at the product seam
- Is delivery-in-the-customer
- Discovery, build, harden, adopt - you own the arc and the outcome
Interview move
When you cite a Cursor capability, pre-load one specific failure you hit with it and how you worked around it. Praise alone reads as a pitch. "I used Agent and also watched it confidently break X, so I learned to gate it with Y" reads as someone who actually uses the tool.
Watch out
Do not invent product specifics. If you haven't used a feature, say what you'd want to try and why, framed as a hypothesis. A wrong claim about how Cursor's indexing works, made to a team that built it, ends the conversation faster than honest curiosity ever would.