A sparse model with few active params per token, a brutal latency target, and an all-to-all on the critical path. The parallelism layout that hits the SLA, why expert parallelism not tensor parallelism is the lever, and the tail the all-to-all hides.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A sparse model with few active params per token, a brutal latency target, and an all-to-all on the critical path. The parallelism layout that hits the SLA, why expert parallelism not tensor parallelism is the lever, and the tail the all-to-all hides.
The screen is whether you reason from active parameters and the all-to-all, not total parameters. Candidates who size a 400B MoE like a 400B dense model are off by an order of magnitude; the strong answer uses expert parallelism to spread the experts, keeps attention TP small inside NVLink, and treats the dispatch/combine all-to-all as the latency term that actually threatens the p99.
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