What experience do you have with ML infrastructure, including distributed GPU clusters?
The resume-walk question for infra roles, with a hidden rubric: layer ownership, scale fluency, and one defensible war story. How to answer credibly at any actual scale, and the inflation tells interviewers catch.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The resume-walk question for infra roles, with a hidden rubric: layer ownership, scale fluency, and one defensible war story. How to answer credibly at any actual scale, and the inflation tells interviewers catch.
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.