interviewing at PANW in about 3 weeks for a senior SWE role on the Cortex side. stalking this thread and would love actual data from recent loops.
specifically: how many coding rounds, did you get a take-home at any point, what was the systems design prompt roughly about, and how long start to offer. role type and level helpful too if you're comfortable sharing.
I've done enough big tech loops to know the FAANG playbook cold but PANW has its own flavor and I want to understand what I'm walking into. any data appreciated.
5 replies
staff_steph
Cortex XDR team specifically or platform? for platform it was 2 coding rounds (medium LC, graph and string parsing), 1 systems design (distributed sensor data ingestion at scale), 1 behavioral, 1 HM. no take-home in my loop, that might vary by team.
backend_bekah
did a PANW loop for a senior backend role on the cloud security product about 4 months ago. 2 coding, 1 SD (design a rate limiting service for API gateway, with security constraints), 1 behavioral, 1 cross-functional round that was half behavioral half 'how would you work with the security research team.' total time from recruiter to offer: 26 days.
quietquit_quincy
the security constraints angle is useful, thank you. I'll brush up on rate limiting with auth context, not just the vanilla distributed counter design.
infra_ines
no take-home in any loop I've heard of at PANW. they do everything live. the coding rounds aren't super tricky, they're more interested in how you think through security-relevant edge cases. like 'what happens if this input is malformed.'
visa_vik
ran mine recently, 28 days start to offer. recruiter communication was actually pretty good, I got proactive updates at each stage which I really appreciated given my timeline pressure.