Your inference p50 is fine but p99 latency spikes under load. How do you fix tail latency?
Users experience the p99, not the median, and the tail is where serving systems quietly break. The causes are queuing and batching effects, not a slow model. Here is how to flatten it.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Users experience the p99, not the median, and the tail is where serving systems quietly break. The causes are queuing and batching effects, not a slow model. Here is how to flatten it.
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.
