2 min lesson
Recruiter screen + early product rounds
Work through the cases in "Recruiter screen + early product rounds", pairing each signal with the move that fits.
Step 1 of 2
The recruiter screen is short and decisive. It covers your background and why Cursor, but it is really checking one thing: do you actually use the product and could you own a real slice of it.
Walk in able to answer three questions without hesitation. They sound soft. They are the filter.
- Why Cursor
- A concrete reason rooted in the product and the bet - not “I love AI.” Name a workflow Cursor changed for you or the wedge you think it has on a specific user.
- What you'd want to own
- A real surface: the enterprise admin experience, the Tab acceptance loop, onboarding for new repos, the agent's multi-file edit trust. Specific beats grand.
- Proof you use Cursor
- How you use it weekly: Agent for multi-file changes, Tab in your flow, @-context across a real repo, a rule you wrote, 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 you wired up.
Then the early product and technical rounds. The JD names 2-3 of them; the content below is the standard shape for a devtools/AI PM loop. Expect three threads, often braided into the same conversation rather than split into tidy rounds.
Can you reason about IDE UX, latency budgets and trust?
Prompt: improve Tab or fix onboarding for a 2M-line repo.
Lead with the user's felt experience, not a funnel.
What to build, cut and in what order - with a reason.
Individual vs enterprise tradeoffs surface here.
Show you'll kill scope to ship the high-impact slice.
Can you reason about architecture with engineers?
Model cost vs quality, context/retrieval, eval design.
You don't need to design the system - you need to follow and push the conversation.