NVIDIA Compiler Engineer Intern interview questions

My 45-minute virtual screen started with a deep dive into the projects on my résumé, especially anything that involved low-level C++ or GPU work (e.g., a CHIP-8 emulator and a CUDA lab). I was asked to explain design choices, debugging stories, and how I measured correctness and performance. The second half was a code-reading exercise: the interviewer pasted a short C++ snippet with several constructor calls (default, value, copy) and a destructor, plus a deliberate memory-management oversight. I had to walk through main, state which constructor or destructor fired at each line, point out the difference between copy construction and assignment, and note the leaked heap object and uninitialised member. No live coding; it was all verbal reasoning. Overall the interview focused on my ability to reason about object lifetime, memory safety, and how my past projects line up with a compiler/GPU rol