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The Interview Loop1 / 2

2 min lesson

The practical project (decision round)

Consider this situation. "Your loop includes a hands-on build: a GTM enrichment-to-routing workflow. Name the four things that most separate a production-grade submission from a demo toy." Start with the decision, then the evidence.

Step 1 of 2

If your loop includes a hands-on build or work trial, it is the highest-signal round in this prep model. Ask the recruiter; some Cursor engineering postings describe an onsite small-project build. Treat it as production, because the reviewers are the people you'd ship next to.

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.

Shape A: orchestration workflow

A Clay (or Zapier/Unify/n8n) table that ingests leads.

Waterfall enrichment → ICP/intent scoring → routing.

Dedup, a score threshold, owner assignment with fallback.

A measurable output: enriched + routed records, match rate.

Shape B: AI agent / automation

An agent that acts against APIs or an MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. server.

LLM classification or personalization where it earns its place.

RAG to ground the agent in real account/product context.

Idempotent actions, retries and a clear audit of what it did.

  1. 1Scope to one demoable slice. One trigger, one enrich-and-score path, one routed output that runs end to end. Working and explained beats grand and half-built.
  2. 2Handle dirty data first. Normalize inputs, dedup and route malformed records aside instead of crashing; reviewers look for this before any clever feature.
  3. 3Make it reliable. Respect provider rate limits, make writes idempotent so a re-run doesn't double-route and retry transient failures.
  4. 4Add AI where it earns its place. LLM classification, personalization or an action-taking agent, each used where it removes real toil.
  5. 5Document and measure. A short spec/runbook plus a dashboard or metric (match rate, % routed correctly, hours saved) proves the self-sufficient-team value.