Run a 7B vision-language model on a Jetson Orin to caption a 25 FPS video stream within 500ms.
A 7B VLM at 25 FPS on an embedded GPU sounds impossible until you stop processing every frame fully. The answer is token pruning, frame-to-frame KV reuse, and a three-stage pipeline that hides latency.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A 7B VLM at 25 FPS on an embedded GPU sounds impossible until you stop processing every frame fully. The answer is token pruning, frame-to-frame KV reuse, and a three-stage pipeline that hides latency.
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.
