2 min lesson
Behavioral / hiring-manager round
Take this situation: "The HM asks for a time you were wrong and changed your mind. Why does Cursor weight this so heavily and what makes a strong version of the story?" Lead with your decision, then add the reason.
Step 1 of 2
The hiring-manager round reads for whether you'll thrive on a small, flat, high-bar team. The themes are bar-awareness, comfort with a fast pace, craft orientation and your honest views on team quality. Bring stories, not adjectives.
Prepare four to six STAR stories that map to the infra work and the values. Aim for range: an incident you handled calmly, a hard cost-versus-reliability tradeoff, a migration or platform-unification you drove and a technical disagreement you resolved. One of those stories should be a time you were wrong and changed course on evidence.
A real outage you helped resolve.
Show calm, clear comms and a blameless postmortem.
End with the systemic fix, not just the hotfix.
A tradeoff where both sides cost something.
Spot instances, right-sizing or a region cut.
State the number and the call you defended.
A platform you standardized or moved.
Show progressive, safe rollout - not big-bang.
Name the blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition. you contained.
A spirited technical debate you were in.
Show truth-seeking over ego.
A time you changed your mind on evidence.
Cursor screens hard for truth-seeking, so the "I was wrong" story carries real weight. The strongest version names what you believed, the evidence that contradicted it and what you did differently - without softening the fact that you'd been wrong.
"I argued hard for active-active across two regions for resilience. When we modeled the data-replication cost and the conflict-resolution complexity, the numbers didn't justify it for our traffic - active-passive with fast failover was the honest call. I'd been anchored on resilience and underweighted cost. I changed the design and we cut spend meaningfully without hurting our SLO."
- Use "I" for the decisions and the shipping; reserve "we" for genuine team facts.
- Quantify outcomes - a p99 number, a cost delta, an error-budget figure - wherever you honestly can.
- Be candid about the pace: Cursor runs intense and false enthusiasm is easy to read.
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Full explanation
Full explanation
Have three sharp questions ready for them: how the infra roadmap is prioritized, how on-call and incidents work and how technical decisions get made on a flat team. Good questions signal you're evaluating the role as a senior IC would and they're a natural place to show you've thought about platform-as-product ownership.