Palo Alto Networks Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

Medium

Positive

Palo Alto, CAPosted May 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My process started with an online testing step that leaned heavily on practical coding in a “bring your own laptop” setup.

The questions that day felt like a mix of strings and arrays, and there were also dynamic programming problems, so it wasn’t just basic scripting.

When I moved into a live technical interview, I ran into an environment mismatch that made things harder than the difficulty label would suggest. The interview required C++ even though I only had real comfort with Python, and I had to keep explaining what I could and couldn’t do in that language. The interviewer was accommodating, but the core question still landed in the C++ context, which made me work slower than I wanted.

Overall, I’d describe

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