Working with Researchers

Infrastructure engineers at AI labs and platform teams have an unusual customer: a researcher whose experiment is the company's product, who needs the cluster today, and whose request may be a bad idea for the fleet. The behavioral round tests whether you can serve that customer without being run by them: saying no with data, saying yes with conditions, finding the need behind the ask, and sharing ownership of outcomes neither side controls alone. This page gives the recurring situations at the boundary, the responses that work in each, worked narratives, and the answers that sound collaborative and fail.