easyOpenAIAnthropicGlean

Given a list of inference latencies, compute the p95 and explain percentile indexing.

Everyone quotes p95 in latency SLOs, but few can compute it without a library and fewer can explain why the index is ceil(p*n)-1, not p*n. The warm-up that screens whether you actually understand the metric you live by.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

20 answers per topic instead of 10, plus saved progress and bookmarks · no cardor unlock all 548 remaining answers · ₹2,000 / $25

Every answer, concept and course, every paper breakdown, all published video lessons, hands-on FDE Lab missions, Premium PDF guides and companion files, the full practice-test bank and work-sample downloads. Referral Premium excludes guide PDFs and their companion files.

6 months · One payment · No auto-renewal

Study alongside free video lessons.

Keep practising

Next in this trackCompute the cosine similarity between two embedding vectors, handling the zero-vector case.Premium Next in this trackParse a JSON-lines file of LLM logs and aggregate tokens generated per request.Premium Next in this trackWrite a generator that yields fixed-size batches from a large iterator for streaming inference.Premium

FEDITOR'S NOTE

The trap is averaging. A candidate who reports mean latency when asked for p95 has missed the entire point of the question, which is that tail latency is what users feel. The second trap is off-by-one in the index: interpolation method matters, and a strong candidate names which one they picked (nearest-rank) rather than pretending there is one true p95.

DISCUSSION · 0

No comments yet — be the first to share your approach.