I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Rakuten (Tokio) in Sep 2025
Interview
Horrible all around, in all honesty.
Had two interviewers (both non-HR representatives) present: one of which you could hold a conversation with, while the other one was having way too much difficulty speaking English and expressing himself to the point I was almost ready to offer to switch to Japanese (despite Rakuten supposedly using it as their official 'inside the company language'). He also did not understand some of my questions even after I repeated myself and gave examples of what kind of response I expect to those.
Both of them asked me mostly behavioural questions (that they both were reading from somewhere off camera, which I could clearly see) that felt very uninspired and somewhat disrespectful, in all honesty. "What inspires you in your work", "What makes you happy", "What are your ambitions", "What kind of technology do you want to master/learn" etc. There has been one question that felt like it was possibly tailored to my CV, but perhaps that was just a coincidence. Other than that there has been little to no talk about what their team does or what the product actually is. I honestly felt like I ended up asking them more questions than they were asking me and perhaps that's why they I did not go further in the process than that.
Ended up getting ghosted by them after that--in all honesty, it should be the other way around. The fact they never even bothered to send even a rejection letter (even after I reached out directly to inquire about the state of the selection process, no less) makes me wonder how they treat their own employees if that's how they treat their candidates
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
-Tell us about how you worked on performance optimization at your previous company
-What inspires you in your work
-How did you solve a particular issue at work (typical STAR stuff)
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Rakuten (Bengaluru) in Jan 2025
Interview
Three rounds of Interview- 2 Technical and 1 technical-managerial.
1. First round: Intro, 2 DSA medium-hard question(Trees), Solid Principal's
2. Second Round: 2 DSA question(EASY-Medium), Implement Decorator, ASYNC, Multithreading, SingleTon class and deep project questions
3. Third round: With the director- Directly started with Why you want to leave your current job? 1 DSA question(trichy)
Got rejected in third round due to Behaviour questions mostly as I was very nervous :(
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Trees- Right view, Design questions, Binary Search questions
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Rakuten (Tokio) in Jun 2025
Interview
Felt relatively disconnected and automated. I would ask clarifying questions about the purpose of a question and just be told that's the way it is. Not a very good vibe for a software company tbh.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Just basic software engineering questions. Nothing really specific or job related