A Cursor system design round, two reports (August and September 2026). In one it was introduced as "design CI/CD", but the candidate says it turned out to be a job scheduler: the interviewer said CI/CD is just the workload. The interviewer's focus was how scheduled jobs are triggered, the task queue and how work is scheduled onto workers, and how worker failures are handled. The other report lists the round as a cron job scheduler. No report gives scale numbers, an API or a data model, so those are yours to propose and ask about. The candidate who described the focus passed this round and went on to the next ones.
Naive approach with serious trade-off — being authored.
Solid baseline with reasonable trade-offs — being authored.
Production-grade approach with explicit trade-off rationale — being authored.
Naive approach with serious trade-off — being authored.
Solid baseline with reasonable trade-offs — being authored.
Production-grade approach with explicit trade-off rationale — being authored.
Naive approach with serious trade-off — being authored.
Solid baseline with reasonable trade-offs — being authored.
Production-grade approach with explicit trade-off rationale — being authored.
Cover happy path. Clarify scope. Identify the obvious bottleneck. Pick a reasonable storage and reasonable scaling approach.
All of the above plus: explicit failure handling, durability vs latency trade-offs, choose the right batching/caching strategy, articulate why.
All of the above plus: organizational concerns (rollout, migration, on-call), quantitative analysis, multi-region considerations, what could go wrong with the proposed solution at 10x scale.
Interviewer hints: The interviewer said CI/CD is only the workload; the focus is triggering scheduled jobs, the task queue and worker scheduling, and handling worker failure (one report).