Reach a Hiring Engineer at Cursor Before the Role Posts
By the time a role is on the job board, hundreds have applied. The honest fix: find the one engineer who already knows a place you share, and ask a 30-second question, not a favor.
Find Your Warm Intro →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick a tech target:
Why the fastest AI startups hire before they post
At a company growing headcount every month, an open seat is a bottleneck, not a formality. Engineers feel the pain of being understaffed long before recruiting writes a job description. So the first names in the pipeline come from a Slack message like 'anyone know a good systems person?', not from an inbound applicant.
That gap between 'we need someone' and 'here is the posting' is your window. If a current engineer already has you in mind because you share a lab, a former team, or a bootcamp cohort, you are the answer to that Slack message. The public application never enters the conversation.
How to get on the radar before the posting exists
The move is not to ask for a job. It is to become a known, credible name to one engineer, cheaply, before there is anything to compete for.
- Lead with the shared thing, not the ask. Open with 'we both worked on the payments team at Stripe' or 'fellow CMU grad', because that is the reason they will read past the first line and the reason they will feel a small pull to reply.
- Ask a question a busy engineer can answer in 30 seconds. Try 'what is the hardest problem your team is hiring against right now?' instead of 'can you refer me?'. You learn what they actually need, and you cost them almost nothing.
- Show one relevant proof, then stop. A single link to a project, PR, or writeup that maps to their stack does more than a resume. Let them pull, do not push.
- Time it to their pain, not the calendar. When they mention shipping fast or being underwater, that is the moment to say 'I would love to help with that', because the need is live and unposted.
Finding the right person to reach (where FindWarmIntros helps)
The hard part is not the message, it is knowing which of the fifty engineers at a startup like Cursor actually shares something real with you and is reachable. Guessing from a company page wastes your best warm paths.
FindWarmIntros is a free tool that does that finding-and-ranking part: it surfaces the real people at your target company who share your school or a past employer, ranks them by the strength of the overlap, and drafts the intro so the shared thing leads. You still write the human follow-up, but you start from the right name instead of a cold list.