Describe a time you slowed a project down on purpose because the quality risk was too high.

How to answer

Cursor’s FDE postings, as of September 2026, put quality on the engineer: they make the FDE responsible for production quality, including evals, metrics and failure modes. ^[1]Source 1Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherCursor (Ashby job board)Source typecompany job board A strong answer shows you can name a quality risk, prove it, and still let the owner of the date decide.

1. The pressure, stated fairly. Who wanted it sooner and why. Make their case sound strong.
2. The specific risk. What would go wrong, for whom, and how badly: “The model mislabeled refunds as disputes, and their agents would have closed real disputes without reading them.” Name one failure, not a feeling.
3. The evidence. What turned a worry into a finding: a replay of last month’s cases, a labeled sample, a near miss in the pilot. Say when you had it.
4. Who decided, and how you made the case. The date usually belongs to the customer’s owner, not to you. Say who you took it to first, the words, the cost of waiting in their terms, and the options you laid out: ship on the date with a guardrail, a shadow period, one team first, or the full delay. Then say who chose.
5. The bar for ready. What had to be true to launch, agreed before the delay started, such as a mislabel rate on a replay of last month’s cases that their operations lead signed off. Give the new date, and say whether you hit it.
6. What the time caught. The fix, and the result once it shipped.

Put the cost of the delay on the table yourself. “Waiting kept their agents on the manual process a while longer, and I priced that in agent hours before I asked” shows you weighed it rather than ignored it.

The traps: a delay you decided alone and announced, a risk you never checked, and a hero story where only you saw the danger.