Top 4 Throughput Interview Questions

Browse 4 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Throughput. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.

Consumer lag on your orders topic climbs every morning and never clears before the next peak. Work through it.

Lag is the integral of arrival rate minus service rate, so establish which of the two moved and whether the consumer is slow or stalled. Check lag per partition before per group, rule out a rebalance loop, and remember that adding consumers beyond the partition count does nothing.

hardscenario

There are forty items left before the release and over the last twelve weeks the team has finished between four and nine a week. The sponsor wants a date. What do you tell them?

Forecast from the whole spread of observed weekly throughput rather than its average, subtract the rate at which the backlog is growing, and give a date with a confidence attached. Then say plainly whether you are offering a forecast or accepting a commitment, because they are not the same promise.

hardscenario

What does batching buy you when serving an LLM, and what does it do to your latency budget?

Batching amortises the memory traffic of reading model weights across many requests, so throughput rises far faster than per-step time does. Continuous batching lets requests join and leave each iteration, but the gain is paid for in tail latency, which is why interactive and bulk traffic want separate pools.

hardconcept

Which delivery metrics would you actually track for a team, and why does velocity stop working the moment you set a target for it?

Track throughput, cycle-time distribution and flow efficiency, because they describe the system rather than the estimate. Velocity is denominated in a unit the team defines, so making it a target lets the number rise without any change in delivered output, and it stops measuring anything.

mediumconcept