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The Interview Loop1 / 3

2 min lesson

The automation / tooling round

Use "The automation / tooling round" to tell the two cases apart, then say what tips the choice.

Step 1 of 3

The automation / tooling roundfix the class, not the ticket

Cursor wants TSEs who build the automations that scale support. You'll likely design or lightly build something that removes toil: a triage bot, a log parser, a macro or an LLM-assisted draft. Bring a concrete example of a tool you've shipped that killed repetitive work, with the before/after.

FIX THE TICKET VS. FIX THE CLASS

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: compare

Both resolve the user; only one shows the engineering-flavored support Cursor is hiring for.

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Full explanation

A tiny log parser that turns a class of tickets into one signal

impact thinking: a tiny log parser that turns a class of tickets into one signal
import re, sys

# Class of problem: "requests time out" tickets. Parse the user's pasted log
# and tell support which known failure mode it is, instead of reading by hand.
PATTERNS = {
    "proxy_block": r"ETIMEDOUT.*api2\.cursor\.sh",
    "auth_expired": r"401|token expired",
    "rate_limited": r"429|rate limit",
}

def classify(log: str) -> str:
    for label, pat in PATTERNS.items():
        if re.search(pat, log, re.I):
            return label
    return "unknown_needs_human"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(classify(sys.stdin.read()))
Interview move

When they hand you a single hard ticket, answer it and then zoom out: "This is the third proxy-timeout pattern this week, so I'd ship a log classifier that auto-tags these and a doc that lets the user self-serve." Closing the ticket shows competence. Killing the class of ticket shows the engineering-flavored support Cursor is actually hiring for.

QThe automation round gives you one recurring support problem. What separates a strong answer from a merely competent one?