Palo Alto Networks interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Palo Alto Networks software engineering interview across 4 levels and 18 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

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Software Engineer Intern (Early-in-Career)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 5 months · Recommended prep: ~3-6 weeks · Cooldown: No reliable India intern reapplication cooldown data found.

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment — MCQ + Coding (HackerRank/CodeSignal)

    Assessment · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Find the Longest Equal Subarray — Given a 0-indexed integer array nums and an integer k, delete at most k elements from nums. Return the length of the longest possible equal subarray (a subarray in which all elements are equal) after the deletions. An empty subarray has length 0.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 — Coding + CS Fundamentals

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: LRU Cache — Design a data structure for a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache with capacity C. Implement get(key) returning the value or -1 if absent, and put(key,value) which inserts/updates and, when at capacity, evicts the least recently used key. Both operations must run in average O(1).

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 — Projects + Light Design

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design HashMap (implement a hash table without built-ins) — Implement a hash map (put / get / remove) WITHOUT using any built-in hash/map library, handling collisions yourself (e.g. bucket chaining) and returning -1 for a missing key. Be ready to discuss the hash function and rehashing.

  4. Round 3: HR / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · ~20-30 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer (SWE / SDE / New Grad, Bangalore)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 5-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen

    Phone · 20-30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank / Codility)

    Assessment · 60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: LRU Cache — Design a data structure for a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. When capacity is exceeded, evict the least-recently-used entry. PANW follow-up: add per-entry TTL expiry.

  3. Round 2: Technical phone screen (hiring manager / engineer)

    Phone · 45-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  4. Round 3: Virtual onsite loop - coding + LLD + domain

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design a URL Shortener (TinyURL) — Design a URL shortening service like TinyURL: generate a short unique key for a long URL, redirect on lookup, and discuss key generation (hashing vs counter/base62), storage, collision handling, and read-scaling with caching.

  5. Round 4: HR / behavioral round

    Behavioral · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior Software Engineer (Bangalore)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 5-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 month

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen

    Phone · 20-30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical phone screen

    Phone · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Median of Two Sorted Arrays — Given two sorted arrays nums1 and nums2, return the median of the combined sorted array. Target O(log(min(m,n))) time via partition-based binary search.

  3. Round 2: Virtual onsite loop - coding + low-level design

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design a scalable security telemetry / detection pipeline — Design a pipeline that ingests millions of security events per second (firewall/endpoint logs), normalizes and enriches them, runs a detection / alert-scoring stage, and stores results for query. Discuss partitioning, back-pressure, exactly-once vs at-least-once, data retention, tenant isolation, and how false positives propagate downstream to analysts.

  4. Round 3: System design round (high-level, security/scale)

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Distributed Rate Limiter — Design a distributed rate limiter for an API gateway: enforce per-client/per-tenant request quotas across many nodes. Discuss algorithms (token bucket / sliding window log/counter), a shared store (Redis) vs local counters, consistency vs latency tradeoffs, and handling bursts and clock skew.

  5. Round 4: Behavioral / hiring manager / director round

    Behavioral · 30-45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Principal Software Engineer (Bangalore)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: Not documented specifically for India; expect a longer, more · Recommended prep: Deep system/architecture design, securit · Cooldown: No published policy.

  1. Round 0: Recruiter + hiring manager screens

    Phone · 30-45 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical / coding + design loop

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Longest Increasing Path in a Matrix — Given an m x n integer matrix, return the length of the longest strictly increasing path. From each cell you may move up/down/left/right. Solve with DFS + memoization (DP over the implicit DAG) in O(m*n).

  3. Round 2: Architecture / system design deep-dive

    System_design · 60-90 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a multi-level parking lot (LLD) with concurrency — Low-level design of a multi-level parking lot: model floors, spots by vehicle type, tickets, and pricing; expose clean interfaces for park/unpark and spot allocation; handle multiple entry/exit gates concurrently (thread-safe allocation using locks). PANW follow-ups probe Java generics and locking strategy.

  4. Round 3: Leadership / cross-functional influence

    Behavioral · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.