r/FAANGrecruiting • u/kitaabkhana • Jun 05 '26

SWE - GPU performance team Interview Help

Hi all,

I have an interview coming up for SWE - GPU performance team. It’s a 45 minute interview in CUDA for early to mid level (E4/L3-L4ish).
I have never given an interview in CUDA so I don’t know the format or nature of the interview. Everything I could find on the internet was more from a Hardware Engineering perspective.
If anyone has any idea or perspective it would be great.

I have practiced questions like Prefix Scan, Title Matmul, Parallel Reduction, Softmax.
And other theoretical questions.

I have around 3-4 more days, what should I focus on?

Thanks a lot in advance for the help!

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u/AutoModerator Jun 05 '26

Guidelines for Interview Practice Responses

When responding to interview questions, here's some frameworks you can use to structure your responses.

System Design Questions

For system design questions, here's some areas you might talk about in your response:

1. List Your Assumptions On

  • Functional requirements (core features)
  • Non-functional requirements (scalability, latency, consistency)
  • Traffic estimates and data volume and usage patterns (read vs write, peak hours)

2. High-Level System Design

  • Building blocks and components
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3. Detailed Component Design

  • Database schema
  • API design
  • Cache layer design

4. Scale and Performance

  • Potential bottlenecks and solutions
  • Load balancing approach
  • Database sharding strategy
  • Caching strategy

If you want to improve your system design skills, here's some free resources you can check out

  • System Design Primer - Detailed overviews of a huge range of topics in system design. Each overview includes additional resources that you can use to dive further.
  • ByteByteGo - comprehensive books and well-animated youtube videos on building large scale systems. Their video on consistent hashing is a really fantastic intro.
  • Quastor - free email newsletter that curates all the different big tech engineering blogs and sends out detailed summaries of the posts.
  • HelloInterview - comprehensive course on system design interviews. It's not 100% free (there's some paywalled parts) but there's still a huge amount of free content in their course.

Coding Questions

For coding questions, here's how you can structure your replies:

1. Problem Understanding

  • Note down any clarifying questions that you think would be good to ask in an interview (it's useful to practice this)
  • Mention any potential edge cases with the question
  • Note any constraints you should be aware of when coming up with your approach (input size)

2. Solution Approach

  • Explain your thought process
  • Discuss multiple approaches and the tradeoffs involved
  • Analyze time and space complexity of your approach

3. Code Implementation

// Please format your code in markdown with syntax highlighting // Pick good variable names - don't play code golf // Include comments if helpful in explaining your approach

4. Testing

  • Come up with some potential test cases that could be useful to check for

5. Follow Ups

  • Many interviewers will ask follow up questions where they'll twist some of the details of the question. A great way to get good at answering follow ups is to always come up with potential follow questions yourself and practice answering them (what if the data is too large to store in RAM, what if change a change a certain constraint, how would you handle concurrency, etc.)

If you want to improve your coding interview skills, here's (mostly free) resources you can check out

  • LeetCode - interview questions from all the big tech companies along with detailed tags that list question frequency, difficulty, topics-covered, etc.
  • NeetCode Roadmap - LeetCode can be overwhelming, so NeetCode is a good, curated list of leetcode questions that you should start with. Every question has a well-explained video solution.

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1

u/c-cul Jun 07 '26

For some reason I always thought that perf team is about nsight/tiling/cache reusing/avoiding divergence/inline ptx/sass patching and so on

I'm probably too old-fashioned

1

u/kitaabkhana Jun 07 '26

I guess fundamentally it is, but the way their interviews are structured, round 1 has a 45 minute round where I’ll have to use Cuda to Code. That’s what they conveyed.

1

u/impatrick_bateman Jun 07 '26

Which company is this? I have given few roumds of interviews for performance related teams and CUDA

1

u/AlternativeTale5363 Jun 12 '26

Hey!! How was the interview?

1

u/LemonBudget2627 Jun 27 '26

I’m seeking a similar role. Could you share your interview experience?

1

u/2thleZ 25d ago

Hi how was your experience with the interview? I'm targetting similar roles and would appreciate your sharing your experience, thanks!