1 min lesson
Walk in with three things ready
Use "Walk in with three things ready" to tell the cases apart, then choose a response for each one.
Step 1 of 2
Walk in with three things ready
One project where you owned an ambiguous problem end-to-end.
Hypothesis, what you built and the result you shipped or validated.
Name a research direction you find exciting and why.
RL for longer-horizon coding, graders or online RL behind Tab.
Location preference, work authorization and timeline.
Have clean answers so nothing stalls the loop later.
“I want to work on AI” and “I love language models” are the answers every candidate gives, so they carry no signal. Anchor instead to something only you could say: a reward-hacking failure you debugged, a credit-assignment problem in a long-horizon agent or a specific reason you think training on real user data beats a curated benchmark.
“I've spent the last year on RL post-training and the part I keep coming back to is graders for tasks unit tests can't score - partial credit on multi-file edits. Cursor is one of the only places where that research ships into a model millions of people use the next week and that loop from idea to shipped model is exactly what I want to be inside.”