Palo Alto Networks Technical Support Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I got contacted by a recruiter on Linkedin for a technical support engineer role, they said no firewall experience was needed. I passed two phone screenings and then got invited for an onsite interview. The interview was 3 hours long. I met with two engineers for 45 mins, then two more engineers for another 45 mins, and finally met with two managers. The first two engineers were kind of arrogant and rude, they smirked when I didn't know an answer. The other engineers and managers were professional though. A couple days later, I got an email from a manager wanting to talk more about the job, I thought it was an offer. But it wasn't, they wanted to hire me as a contractor first and then maybe full time if a position opened up, no promises. I'm not recommending this because of the immature behavior of the first two engineers, everyone else was good.

I sent in my application online. Then, a recruiter from Talent Acquisition reached out. She gave me the lowdown on the job and how things are at the company, and asked me to tell her a bit about myself. After our chat, there was a quick 15-minute coding test with multiple-choice questions on stuff like TCP/IP, routing, and MITM, all while the recruiter was still on the line. Following that, there were two more interviews. The next one was with my potential manager and a senior engineer, where they asked me a mix of technical and behavioral questions. The final interview involved two team members and went deep into technical details, mostly focusing on packet-level concepts.

I went through three technical interviews. They didn't ask any good technical questions, just basic textbook TCP stuff from their inexperienced team. They didn't ask about my troubleshooting experience, which was weird since they seemed less experienced than me. The first two interviews with the hiring manager and team were fine. But the third one felt like the interviewer was just Googling basic TCP questions. I think he wasn't that experienced because when I gave a quicker solution to one question, he didn't like it and asked me to explain the packet capture output. Honestly, do they always do packet captures when customers call? Because customers calling support are usually Tier 2/3 network engineers who have already done their own troubleshooting. So, asking them to do packet captures again just wastes their time. I think Palo Alto needs more experienced people on their technical interview panel. I do like the company and use their products though.