To get ready, I worked through a well-known list of 150 LeetCode problems, the lessons from an online system design course, that course's drills for debugging and refactoring code that already exists, and a few YouTube walkthroughs of classic system design questions. In system design I mostly picked simpler problems and read up on fundamentals such as APIs, caching, databases and concurrency. I also dabbled in object-oriented design, practicing on the Gilded Rose and Racing Car katas.
If I could redo one thing, I'd split my prep time differently. LeetCode ate up a lot of my hours, while system design practice, particularly sketching diagrams and narrating my thinking as I went, would have paid off more. That turned out to be the part I found toughest, mostly because I'd rarely done it.
The loop began with a recruiter call and moved on to technical and behavioral interviews. Overall they felt friendly, more like a chat than a grilling. On the technical end I got an exercise in debugging and refactoring code that was already written, one LeetCode-style problem, and a system design question. What the interviewers wanted to see was how I thought things through, and they noticed whether I handled conditions and edge cases.
The behavioral rounds were pretty standard: stories from my past experience, plus what-would-you-do scenarios at work, a few of which were about where AI fits when you build software.
What I'd recommend is rehearsing your reasoning aloud: how you'd test what you wrote, what you do about edge cases, and where AI fits into the way you code. Bring concrete stories from earlier jobs, and brush up on common behavioral prompts, notably ones about weighing tradeoffs, asking others for help, and keeping people informed when you're short on time. Knowing roughly what Palo Alto Networks sells in security and where it stands in the cybersecurity market doesn't hurt either.
On system design, rehearse laying out your answer step by step while you draw the diagram at the same time. Interviewers will push on optimization, tradeoffs, and what might fail. Get the core terms down so you can sketch and explain the usual diagrams.
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