Tenstorrent AI Infrastructure Engineer interview questions

Trace a grid into blocks and warps, then distinguish resident work from ready work. Derive an occupancy limit without treating it as a speed target.

Follow the weight bytes through a small decode batch and a long prefill. A scoped roofline calculation explains the difference without pretending to predict actual latency.

Follow the running maximum and weighted sum across attention tiles, with executable arithmetic and an honest memory-traffic comparison.

Count two matrix shapes to derive the H100 ridge, throughput ceilings and time floors. Compare an illustrative measurement with its bound before deciding what to optimize.

Derive resident-block limits and distinguish resident warps from ready work before trading registers for more occupancy.

Separate storage scope from physical backing, then follow a warp through adjacent and strided loads. Count useful bytes and requested sectors before inferring HBM traffic or speed.

Derive the weight-only shortcut, then add KV traffic and feasible eight-GPU placement. A worked latency floor shows why batch size alone cannot establish the decode bottleneck.

Normalize link directions, count collective bytes, and see why a gradient reduction can outlast its real overlap window.

Follow a token into retained attention state, derive bytes per position for a 70B model, and distinguish present cache usage from the room needed to finish a response.

Trace stable row normalization, handle independent strides and fully masked inputs, then separate fusion traffic from measured speed.

Work from each GPU's cache budget, reserve room for generated tokens, then check latency separately. A limiting-rank example shows why fitting today's prompts is not enough to admit tomorrow's work.

Compare useful parallel work, data movement and reuse. A synthetic CPU/GPU crossover shows why a faster kernel can still lose the end-to-end request.

Work from token timestamps to first-token wait, average pace and individual stalls. Then count requests meeting both latency limits, keeping failures and measurement boundaries explicit.

Draw query-head sharing, count actual stored state and compare payloads with explicit model geometry and binary units.

Map a non-divisible array onto blocks, guard the final 189 threads, and separate kernel traffic from host transfers without inventing measured timings.

Trace one cache position through a block table, calculate the memory recovered from oversized reservations, and explain why sharing still needs careful writes and matching.