What are FSDP and DeepSpeed ZeRO, and how do their sharding stages differ?
FSDP and ZeRO let you train models too big for one GPU without splitting the compute. The signal is the ZeRO stages (what gets sharded at each level) and the communication you pay for it. Here is the answer.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
FSDP and ZeRO let you train models too big for one GPU without splitting the compute. The signal is the ZeRO stages (what gets sharded at each level) and the communication you pay for it. Here is the answer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.