okay so I just finished the PANW new grad SWE process and I'm posting this because I genuinely could not find a clean writeup when I was prepping. hopefully this helps the next person.
I applied through their campus portal in February for a summer 2026 start. Got the recruiter call pretty fast, within 2 weeks of applying.
The process 30-min recruiter screen (standard: background, why panw, timeline) Coding screen on Codility: 2 questions, 90 minutes Virtual onsite: 4 rounds over one day
Coding screen One medium array/hashmap problem and one graph traversal (BFS). Both solvable in Python. I got both but the graph one took me to the last 5 minutes. Practice BFS and DFS, not just recursion, know how to do them iteratively too.
Onsite Round 1: Coding (two more problems, similar difficulty. One string manipulation, one binary search variant) Round 2: System design lite. For new grads they don't expect you to design Twitter. They asked me to design a simple notification service: clients register, events come in, service delivers notifications. Focus on the components, not the scale math. Round 3: Behavioral. Two questions: a time I debugged something hard, a project I was most proud of. They did push back on my second answer, wanted specifics about my contribution vs the team's. Be ready for that. Round 4: This was a short culture/values chat with a second recruiter. Very low pressure. Just be honest about what kind of work environment you want.
What surprised me PANW takes the behavioral round seriously even for new grads. They're not just checking boxes. The system design round is actually a real round, not a freebie. And they moved pretty fast: offer came in 10 days after onsite.
Comp My offer: $155k base + $60k RSU over 4 years + $15k signing. Bay Area. Felt competitive with what classmates got at other mid-tier security or infra companies.
Happy to answer questions. Accepting was a tough call vs a startup offer but the stability won.