diff --git a/tools/launcher/examples/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/specdec_bench.yaml b/tools/launcher/examples/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/specdec_bench.yaml
index a25a3fe3452..d333a606cc8 100644
--- a/tools/launcher/examples/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/specdec_bench.yaml
+++ b/tools/launcher/examples/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5/specdec_bench.yaml
@@ -32,13 +32,13 @@ pipeline:
 
   global_vars:
     hf_model: /hf-local/nvidia/Kimi-K2.5-NVFP4
-    # Trained+exported DFLASH draft; override: pipeline.global_vars.draft_model_dir=<path>
-    draft_model_dir: /hf-local/nvidia/Kimi-K2.5-DFlash
+    # Trained+exported DFLASH draft; override: pipeline.global_vars.draft_model=<path>
+    draft_model: /hf-local/nvidia/Kimi-K2.5-DFlash
 
   task_0:
     script: common/specdec_bench/run.sh
     args:
-      - --draft_model_dir <<global_vars.draft_model_dir>>
+      - --draft_model_dir <<global_vars.draft_model>>
       - --speculative_algorithm DFLASH
       - --engine VLLM
       - --mtbench /hf-local/HuggingFaceH4/mt_bench_prompts/raw/question.jsonl
diff --git a/tools/launcher/examples/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16/hf_streaming_dspark_warmstart.yaml b/tools/launcher/examples/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16/hf_streaming_dspark_warmstart.yaml
index ddf17ba01f1..9b2334b2dc0 100644
--- a/tools/launcher/examples/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16/hf_streaming_dspark_warmstart.yaml
+++ b/tools/launcher/examples/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16/hf_streaming_dspark_warmstart.yaml
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ pipeline:
     # config.json layer-type vocabulary already patched for tf5 (see header).
     hf_model: /hf-local/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16
     # The published drafter the warm start continues from.
-    drafter: /hf-local/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16-DSpark
+    draft_model: /hf-local/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16-DSpark
 
   # Build /scratchspace/data/train.jsonl. Point data.data_path at the full
   # Spec-Decoding-Dataset-v2 corpus to reproduce; eagle_utils also accepts a
@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ pipeline:
       # causal attention and attention sink all come from this recipe — see header.
       - --config modules/Model-Optimizer/modelopt_recipes/huggingface/models/nvidia/Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16/speculative_decoding/dspark_warmstart.yaml
       - model.model_name_or_path=<<global_vars.hf_model>>
-      - dflash.dflash_init_checkpoint=<<global_vars.drafter>>
+      - dflash.dflash_init_checkpoint=<<global_vars.draft_model>>
       - data.data_path=/scratchspace/data/train.jsonl
       # The stock Nemotron template has no {% generation %} tags; without a tagged copy
       # answer_only_loss trains on an all-zero mask (see header).
diff --git a/tools/precommit/check_launcher_yaml.py b/tools/precommit/check_launcher_yaml.py
index 2e0f8f92617..cc6f052cb88 100644
--- a/tools/precommit/check_launcher_yaml.py
+++ b/tools/precommit/check_launcher_yaml.py
@@ -112,6 +112,52 @@ def _try_load_recipe(recipe_path: Path, source: Path) -> list[str]:
     return []
 
 
+def _global_vars_schema() -> set[str] | None:
+    """Field names accepted by ``GlobalVariables``, or None if it can't be read.
+
+    Parsed out of ``core.py`` rather than imported: importing it pulls in ``nemo_run``,
+    which is not a dependency of the pre-commit environment.
+    """
+    core = _LAUNCHER_DIR / "core.py"
+    try:
+        source = core.read_text(encoding="utf-8")
+    except OSError:
+        return None
+    match = re.search(r"^class GlobalVariables.*?(?=^@|\Z)", source, re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)
+    if not match:
+        return None
+    return set(re.findall(r"^\s{4}(\w+)\s*:", match.group(0), re.MULTILINE))
+
+
+def _check_global_vars(pipeline: dict, path: Path) -> list[str]:
+    """Reject ``global_vars`` keys the launcher's dataclass cannot accept.
+
+    ``global_vars`` is a fixed-field dataclass, not a free-form mapping, so an unknown key
+    fails at launch with ``No parameter named 'X' exists`` — after the user has set up a
+    cluster environment. This has now bitten twice (OMNIML-5024, then the Nemotron-3.5
+    DSpark warm-start example), so it is checked here instead.
+    """
+    schema = _global_vars_schema()
+    global_vars = pipeline.get("global_vars")
+    if schema is None or not isinstance(global_vars, dict):
+        return []
+    errors = [
+        f"{path}: global_vars key {key!r} is not a field of GlobalVariables "
+        f"(valid: {', '.join(sorted(schema))})"
+        for key in global_vars
+        if key not in schema
+    ]
+    # A reference to a key that is never defined interpolates to the literal
+    # ``<<global_vars.X>>`` and reaches the job as a nonsense path.
+    refs = sorted(set(re.findall(r"<<global_vars\.(\w+)>>", path.read_text("utf-8"))))
+    errors.extend(
+        f"{path}: <<global_vars.{ref}>> is referenced but never defined"
+        for ref in refs
+        if ref not in global_vars
+    )
+    return errors
+
+
 def _scan_launcher_yaml(path: Path) -> list[str]:
     errors: list[str] = []
     try:
@@ -124,6 +170,8 @@ def _scan_launcher_yaml(path: Path) -> list[str]:
     if not isinstance(pipeline, dict):
         return []
 
+    errors.extend(_check_global_vars(pipeline, path))
+
     for task in pipeline.values():
         if not isinstance(task, dict):
             continue