tl;dr: Overall, a positive experience. No offer, but I could consider applying again in the future for a different role.

Phone screen: A decent coding problem. I had not seen the problem before but was able to code it up without too much trouble. This was followed by an object modeling problem for software design.

Onsite:

The good:

• The entire interview process felt more like a discussion, something I might do on a day-to-day basis at work. I really enjoyed the experience, especially since I was interviewing after more than a decade.
• They had a good mix of coding and system design rounds.
• They had a 2-hour live coding round that I really enjoyed. I only wish we had started it right away instead of the first 20 minutes or so being spent with the interviewer talking about the team, project, etc., so I could have gotten some more time to work on the problem.
• The recruiter was available throughout the process to answer any questions I had.
• The hiring manager was good to talk to and answered all my questions.
• There was no HR round with subjective questions.

The bad:

• It appears each interviewer is designated to ask a particular question (for every person they interview; that's the impression I got speaking with the lunch interviewer) and they have a very specific answer in mind. If you deviate from their answer, even if you solve the problem optimally, points are potentially deducted.
• I had an object modeling round where I also had to code up, on the whiteboard, a scheduling algorithm for the defined multi-agent system. I went with an approach that I believe was optimal, would scale very easily, and came from my distributed systems background. While I explained the approach to the interviewer, I believe he had something else in mind. It is possible I lost points here due to my solution not aligning with what the interviewer might have had in mind.

The neutral:

• They have a live coding round of 2 hours where you get roughly 70-80 minutes to design and code up a software that does some sort of data processing (I cannot reveal this due to NDA). I think this is a great way to interview people and I really enjoyed this round. My solution was near optimal, but definitely not the optimal one. While I did explain to the interviewer during the code review the optimal approach that I would implement if I had more time, I believe I lost points here.
• They do not necessarily look for candidates with the ability to learn new things fast; rather, they appear to want candidates with the ability to solve problems in a quick and specific way. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact, it could be working out very well for the company/team, but it does not agree with my philosophy on software engineering. I should mention that this may (or may not) vary across teams within the company.
• They have been looking to fill this position for some time, and it appears they want a developer (with some system design experience) who can code with very little to no errors in one go, rather than a software architect (who can also code). This appears to deviate from the job description and the impression I got from the recruiter and hiring manager, which seemed to indicate the desirable candidate basically having a solid background in large-scale distributed systems with related successful projects, who could come in and possibly drive the future direction of the product, rather than being an off-the-shelf code-monkey.

Summary: In general, Box seems to be a good place to work. They have industry-standard compensation (sometimes even better), good benefits, and the people I spoke to seemed to enjoy their jobs. At some point later in my career, I could consider applying again for a different role.

Implement the "xyz" algorithm. [White-board]

Design a "abc" system with relevant object models and implement the related scheduling algorithm. [White-board]

Design and code up on a computer using your language and editor of choice a "pqr" system with "mno" constraints and "klm" conditions, with support for "xyz" features. Overall time-complexity for "abc" operations should be O("hij"). [Live coding exercise]

High-level technical walk-through of a previous project. [White-board]