When a user closes the browser mid-inference, how do you propagate cancellation and actually stop the GPU work?
A 2-second inference and a user who closed the tab. Naive stacks keep the GPU burning to completion. Real cancellation means propagating disconnect all the way to the batch scheduler.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A 2-second inference and a user who closed the tab. Naive stacks keep the GPU burning to completion. Real cancellation means propagating disconnect all the way to the batch scheduler.
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.
