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Design and benchmark optimized inference pipelines

NVIDIASoftware Engineer · Technical Screen

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Design and benchmark optimized inference pipelines evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

Describe PyTorch Dynamo (aka TorchDynamo) in the context of accelerating inference: what it does, how it captures/compiles graphs, and how it relates to TorchInductor and backends like TensorRT. List several techniques to speed up inference (briefly): forms of parallelism (data/model/pipeline), effective batching, operator fusion, quantization, kernel autotuning, CUDA Graphs, overlapping compute and data transfer (e.g., pinned memory/streams), sparsity, caching, and graph-level compilers. How would you design a fair inference benchmark? Specify metrics (latency p50/p95/p99, throughput, GPU/SM utilization, memory), test setup (GPU model, precision, batch size and sequence length, warmup and iteration counts, concurrency), baselines (vanilla PyTorch), and how to report absolute and percentage improvements.