How do you keep a multi-week training run alive across hardware failures and stragglers?
At 16k GPUs something fails every few hours, Meta logged 466 interruptions in 54 days training Llama 3. The checkpoint-interval math, straggler detection, and automation that turn failures into a budget line instead of an emergency.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
At 16k GPUs something fails every few hours, Meta logged 466 interruptions in 54 days training Llama 3. The checkpoint-interval math, straggler detection, and automation that turn failures into a budget line instead of an emergency.
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.