Went through the PANW software engineer interview process earlier this year for a senior SWE role on their cloud security platform team. Sharing the full loop because I couldn't find good details when I was prepping.
Stages in order: Recruiter call (30 min) Hiring manager intro (30 min, casual) Technical phone screen (60 min, coding + light system design) Onsite panel: 4 rounds back to back Two coding rounds One system design round One behavioral/values round
Total elapsed time from recruiter first reach out to offer: about 5 weeks. The process felt organized compared to some smaller companies I've done recently, but not as slick as the big hyperscalers.
Coding: Both coding rounds were LeetCode medium difficulty, roughly. One was graph-adjacent (BFS variant), one was string manipulation with some edge cases. Nothing asked in Rust or Go, Python and Java both fine. They use CoderPad.
System design: More security-skewed than a generic SWE system design. I got asked to design a distributed logging and alerting pipeline. They cared a lot about fault tolerance and what happens when a node goes down mid-stream. If you have any background with Kafka, Elasticsearch, or log aggregation, bring it up naturally, it fits.
Hiring manager convo: Pretty low-key. They wanted to know what drew me to security infrastructure, not just software in general. Have an honest answer for that.
Timeline to offer: They gave me 48 hours to decide after verbal, which was tight. Extension was possible but annoying to ask for.
Happy to answer specifics if anyone's in the process now.