Cursor technical screens interview

Round 2 of 4 · 8 questions reported

See the whole loop
Length
60 min
Format
One to three live coding rounds
They grade
Production-minded code, clean interfaces, edge cases, and how well the code takes changed requirements
AI use
No AI other than autocomplete; Cursor's CEO calls coding without AI a time-boxed test of skill
Heads-up
Editor-flavored problems: parsing a streamed LLM response, applying an edit to a file, diffing a file tree, retrieving code context.

Questions Cursor asks in this round 8

  • Repository Merkle tree hashing and change detectionCodingHash a code repository into a Merkle tree over files and directories so changed paths are found by comparing hashes top-down instead of rescanning everything. Reported on…
    Last asked Sep 2026
  • Design a CI/CD systemSystem designOn every commit, build and test the code on a fleet of workers, then roll it out to production safely, with logs, retries and rollbacks.
    Last asked Aug 2026
  • Design versioned IDE settings for users and teamsSystem designDesign the service that stores an editor's settings for each user and for teams, so a user's setup follows them across machines and a team can set shared defaults. Cover how user…
    Last asked Jul 2026
  • Streaming Markdown code parserCodingParse Markdown code fences out of a token stream as it arrives, emitting complete code blocks without waiting for the whole document. Reported on 1point3acres' Cursor bank;…
    Last asked Jul 2026
  • Transactional in-memory key-value databaseCodingBuild an in-memory key-value store with transactional reads and writes: operations inside a transaction see each other's effects and commit or roll back atomically. Reported on…
    Last asked Jul 2026
  • Design a durable cron job schedulerSystem designDesign a service that runs recurring jobs on cron-style schedules and does not lose them when machines fail. Cover how schedules are stored and turned into the next run time, how…
    Last asked Apr 2026
  • Project deep dive: present a project you ledBehavioralPresent a project you led in about 20 minutes: context, your role, the architecture, three hard trade-offs, metrics, cost and return, and what you would change. Then take 25…
    Last asked Apr 2026
  • Pluggable hierarchical rate limiterCodingDesign a rate limiter with hierarchical limits (user, team, global) whose limit rules are pluggable without changing the core. Reported on 1point3acres' Cursor bank; reconstructed…
    Last asked Feb 2026