Your agent takes 90 seconds to complete a task. How do you make it fast?
Agent latency is a step-count problem disguised as a speed problem. The winning move is removing round trips, not shaving milliseconds off each one, and knowing which step you can delete is the whole interview.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Agent latency is a step-count problem disguised as a speed problem. The winning move is removing round trips, not shaving milliseconds off each one, and knowing which step you can delete is the whole interview.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
