1 min lesson
Know your boundaries with adjacent teams
Say what this means in practice: "Interviewers probe whether you understand the seams."
Step 1 of 3
Know your boundaries with adjacent teamsso you can say where this role stops
Interviewers probe whether you understand the seams. Cursor's exact org chart isn't public, but most fast-growing product companies split infra responsibilities along recognizable lines. Speak to the boundary and flag any specific claim as your inference.
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Advanced table
Treat exact team names as illustrative unless you can confirm them
- Adjacent team
- ML / Model Infrastructure
- Owns
- GPU fleets, inference serving, model training and rollout pipelines
- Where you hand off
- You provide the network, IAM and cost substrate; they own the inference runtime on top
- Adjacent team
- Core / Backend Services
- Owns
- Application services, APIs, business logic
- Where you hand off
- They consume your clusters, mesh and deploy pipeline; you don't own their code
- Adjacent team
- Billing / Platform Data
- Owns
- Usage metering and customer billing
- Where you hand off
- You feed cloud-cost and tagging data; they turn customer usage into invoices
| Adjacent team | Owns | Where you hand off |
|---|---|---|
| ML / Model Infrastructure | GPU fleets, inference serving, model training and rollout pipelines | You provide the network, IAM and cost substrate; they own the inference runtime on top |
| Core / Backend Services | Application services, APIs, business logic | They consume your clusters, mesh and deploy pipeline; you don't own their code |
| Billing / Platform Data | Usage metering and customer billing | You feed cloud-cost and tagging data; they turn customer usage into invoices |
Framing only - treat exact team names as illustrative unless you can confirm them. The seam, not the org chart, is what the interviewer is testing.
When asked to describe the role, answer in the four pillars and then name one boundary unprompted: "I'd own network, orchestration, edge and compute - and I'd expect ML Infra to own GPU serving on top of the substrate I provide." Naming the seam unprompted signals you think in systems, not silos.