2 min lesson
Recruiter screen: motivation and fit
Draft your two-sentence "why infrastructure at Cursor" for the recruiter screen. Make it specific enough that a generic candidate couldn't have written it.
Step 1 of 2
The recruiter screen runs about 30 minutes and sorts for two things: a specific reason you want this infrastructure role and evidence that you actually use and care about Cursor. It's informal, but the non-generic candidates are the ones who advance.
Expect questions on your background, why Cursor, why infrastructure and which part of the stack interests you. The trap is answering at the altitude of every other candidate. "I like scale" and "I want to work on hard problems" tell the recruiter nothing - anchor to a layer and a reason.
- Why infra
- Name a layer you're drawn to: VPC networking, EKS at scale, edge abuse-protection or cost attribution - and why.
- Why Cursor
- Tie it to the stakes: foundation under 1M+ DAUs where latency, cost and abuse are first-order business problems.
- Product use
- You actually use Cursor; you can name an infra-adjacent thing you admire or would change.
- Headline story
- One at-scale infra win you can summarize in 90 seconds with a real before/after number.
Cursor is a small, flat, talent-dense team where every hire ships from week one. The recruiter is partly reading whether you're calibrated to that pace and whether your motivation will survive contact with the actual work.
"I love distributed systems" and "I want impact" are non-answers because every candidate says them. Anchor to something concrete you can only say if you've thought about Cursor: the latency characteristics of an AI editor, the cost shape of GPU-backed inference or an abuse vector an editor at this scale has to defend. Specificity is the whole signal here.