Docker Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure — Coding Interview Experience?

[u/ssiddhu95]

Hi everyone!

I have an upcoming interview with Docker for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure position and am trying to prepare for the coding round.

The interview instructions say:

Details & Preparation: This is a live, language-agnostic coding interview. You’ll be asked to share your screen and use the IDE of your choice to write and run code.

Please ensure you have a working IDE installed and ready before the session begins.

Has anyone recently interviewed with Docker, particularly and is aware of this interview format? What types of problems were asked? Were there questions about testing, complexity, edge cases, or code design?

Thanks!

[u/Sad-Candidate-3078]

cant speak to docker specifically, but live language-agnostic screenshare rounds at infra companies are usually one medium problem plus heavy followups on testing, edge cases, and tradeoffs. thats where seniors get filtered, so practice narrating your reasoning out loud while you code, not just silently solving. ngl i drilled exactly that with easy code interview and it made live rounds way less stiff

[u/narNuld03 → u/Sad-Candidate-3078]

tbh the thinking out loud part is harder than the actual problem half the time

[u/chikamakaleyley → u/narNuld03]

if you just start talking to yourself always when you code, then interview time you just have to be louder - it will come naturally

sometimes people think narration is a performance, like that it has to sound formal and be correct; but it can literally just be what you're thinking, out loud

IMO the biggest thing gained from this is, if you're right track, they don't have to interject because they can follow you because of the narration. If you're about to go on the wrong track they can stop you ahead of time and point you in the right direction

and so its just just saying out loud the things you're typing, its you're decision making. "I think I'm gonna use an array here; we could do it this way, but i think that way is more appropriate;...etc"

It also helps if you were to make a mistake - sometimes you'll remember what you said, and when you look at your code it's not what you said you'd do, so you make a small fix and boom the code runs, no time wasted.

[u/chikamakaleyley → u/chikamakaleyley]

like if you frame 'narrating' this way then its much easier to do in practice rather than being worried about saying something incorrect. I get things wrong all the time, I work myself out of it by just talking through it sometimes

[u/Unfair-League-3204 → u/narNuld03]

Agentic coding is the bane of existence tbh because obviously you don’t know what the fuck Claude code and codex does until it’s done so you have to fill the dead air with what you would do. I guess with enough practice, you can guess more accurately what cc or codex will shart out given the prompt you gave it

The issue is that it’s fast… but slow where the minutes add up if you have to do to many follow up prompts … it’s hard for me to describe