How do you cut training cost with spot/preemptible GPUs without losing days of work to a preemption?
Spot GPUs frequently run 60-90% cheaper, and they disappear with two minutes' notice. The savings hold only if a preemption costs you minutes rather than the whole run. Here is how to make that the case.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Spot GPUs frequently run 60-90% cheaper, and they disappear with two minutes' notice. The savings hold only if a preemption costs you minutes rather than the whole run. Here is how to make that the case.
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.
