A multi-hop agent feels sluggish at p95. Design its latency budget and cut tail latency without swapping models.

Most candidates reach for a smaller model first. The staff answer builds an explicit per-stage latency budget, parallelizes independent tool calls, and spends the time budget where the user actually feels it.

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