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.
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.
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.
