← Back to Directory

Palo

Mid-sized

Palo appears to be a technology company, though its specific industry focus is not widely documented. Without more precise identification, it is best characterized as a growing company operating in the tech sector.

7 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Palo·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Palo for a software engineering role. The whole thing was one big open-ended question about designing a job scheduling and metrics platform on top of a Kubernetes-style infrastructure. Dense topic, lots of surface area to cover.
  • Design a cloud-native job scheduling and metrics monitoring platform for a Kubernetes-like environment, covering job submission APIs, scheduling logic with resource constraints, failure handling, and operational metrics with alerting.

“This thing sprawled fast.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Went through a coding round at Palo for a software engineer role. Three questions, all algorithmic, ranging from pretty standard to genuinely tricky. The expression evaluator one took me longer than I'd like to admit.
  • Given a sorted array of integers and a target value, find the index of the target. Return -1 if it's not there. Expected O(log n) time.
  • Design a data structure that supports insert, remove, and getRandom, all in average O(1) time.
  • Evaluate a math expression given as a string with +, -, *, / operators and non-negative integers. Operator precedence applies. Follow-up: support parentheses.

“Classic binary search, nothing to say really.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Palo and got a greedy string problem involving placing water tanks on a street to cover adjacent houses. Classic minimize-the-count type question but with enough edge cases to trip you up if you're not careful.
  • You're given a string where 'H' is a house and '-' is an empty plot. A house is covered if a water tank is placed directly next to it (left or right). Tanks can only go on empty plots. Find the minimum number of tanks needed to cover every house, or return -1 if it's impossible.

“My first instinct was to scan left to right and greedily place a tank as far right as possible whenever I hit an uncovered house.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a software engineer role at Palo and got a classic histogram problem. Nothing too surprising but the constraints were large enough that a naive O(n^2) solution would've timed out, so they clearly wanted the stack-based approach.
  • Given an array of non-negative integers representing bar heights in a histogram (each bar has width 1), find the largest rectangular area you can form using one or more consecutive bars. The rectangle's height is limited by the shortest bar in the chosen range.

“I knew this problem but still fumbled the stack logic under pressure.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Palo for a software engineer role. The core problem was a config management system for a fleet of devices, and the follow-ups pushed pretty hard on consistency and scale. Felt like a solid 45 minutes of back-and-forth.
  • Design a system that lets roughly 1,000 admin users manage configurations for roughly 1,000 devices, where configs are updated daily. Walk through the main APIs, the storage model, the rollout workflow, and how the system behaves operationally.
  • How would you scale this system if the number of devices and admins grew significantly?
  • How would you guarantee strong consistency for configuration updates across the system?

“This is a meaty one and I underestimated how much ground it covers.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Palo and got a meaty systems/concurrency problem about building an alert execution engine from scratch. The problem had a lot of moving parts and I think I handled most of it but the state transition piece tripped me up a bit.
  • You're given a client API with methods for fetching alert configs, executing metric queries, and sending notifications. Build an alert execution engine that evaluates each alert on its own interval, fires notifications when a metric crosses a threshold, and resolves alerts when they drop back below it.

“This one looked manageable at first glance but the complexity stacks up fast.”

View Post

Palo·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
System design round at Palo for a software engineer role. The whole session was basically one big rate limiter question broken into layers, starting simple and getting progressively harder until we were talking distributed consensus and failure modes.
  • Design a rate limiter for a backend service that enforces per-identity limits (per user ID, IP, or API key), handles high concurrency, scales to millions of requests per second, and works across a distributed deployment. Walk through algorithm choice, data structures, rejection behavior, and how you'd handle distributed state.

“This was the whole interview basically.”

View Post