RejectedTechnical Screen

60-Minute Merkle Tree Phone Screen, Finished Everything and Still Rejected

CursorSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026

Around the start of September I did a 60-minute phone screen with Cursor. After Cursor merged with SpaceX AI it got renamed to SpaceX AI. The problem was writing a Merkle tree. You have to build a Merkle tree to represent a file system, write get_hash, and write diff to compare 2 trees. You have to write all the tests yourself. The logic is the same as a Merkle tree, except a node can have N chil…

Shared by a candidate · reported Sep 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.