Mercari Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 66 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Mercari.
Mercari
Software Engineer
Mid Average Negative experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Take home Technical screen Phone screen Onsite
Interview formats
Coding Technical Behavioral Presentation
The process started with a bring-home coding assignment that was supposed to be done in a week but they expected it to be finished in 8 hours. After that, there were 3 rounds of interviews: one with a team member, then the team manager, and finally the director. The interviews were entirely in Japanese and were not technical. They focused on past experiences and the scale of previous projects. They also specifically asked about company values and whether I was a user of their service, going into detail about my usage. One of the interviewers also asked about my OSS contributions. The team member and manager focused on specific things not mentioned in the job description. I found out that in that particular team, 2 out of 5 people had quit within a year. The team member and manager seemed short-sighted and lacked compassion, which led me to decline the final interview.
Confirmed questions8 questions
- Can you build a pub/sub web API that can scale to 200k RPS, with future capabilities for authentication and/or authorization, and a backend messaging system?
- Do you have high-coverage unit tests for your code?
- Did you write documentation for your project?
Mercari
Software Engineer
Intern Easy Positive experience Accept offer 4 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Onsite
Interview formats
Behavioral Coding System Design
I had a great experience with very friendly interviewers that took a holistic fit approach. There was an initial 15-minute HR call to review details about the overall co-op program and gage my general interest. This was followed by an engineering manager behavioral interview round, and then an onsite composed of 3 30-minute interviews with engineers. The first two were coding questions and the third was system design, but each also had a behavioral component and plenty of time to get to know the company better.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- They asked behavioral questions during the interview with the engineering manager.
- They asked coding questions during the onsite interviews.
- They asked system design questions during the onsite interviews.
Mercari
Software Engineer
Entry Easy Negative experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical
The interview process was terrible. They didn't ask about past experience or relevant questions for the role. Instead, they repeatedly asked about the scale of the applications I've worked on, as if I only deal with numbers and don't develop products. Even the recruiter was fixated on the application scale, ignoring my experience and technologies. They seem to think their large-scale applications are superior. Communication was slow, with a response after 10 days. A technical round lacked any actual technical questions. The interviewer seemed inexperienced in the field and uninterested, constantly checking the clock and cutting the interview short. I advise against applying to Mercari India.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Could you tell me about the scale of the application you are currently working on?
Mercari Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Mercari interview reports.
“What is the consequence of initializing all weights with either zeros or ones?”
Read reports →“Given a dataset of parent-child relationships formatted as (parent, child) pairs, where individuals are represented by unique positive integers, and considering a sample input like pairs = [ (5, 6), (1, 3), (2, 3), (3, 6), (15, 12), (5, 7), (4, 5), (4, 9), (9, 12), (30, 16) ], implement a function that takes this data and outputs two sets: one containing all individuals with no recorded parents, and another containing all individuals with precisely one recorded parent. The order of elements in the output collections does not matter. Additionally, provide a complexity analysis of your solution with 'n' representing the total number of pairs in the input.”
Read reports →“How would you find duplicate elements in an array that is not sorted?”
Read reports →“How would you approach searching within a 2D matrix?”
Read reports →“Given the backend API and screenshots, create a frontend app using any technology that meets these requirements: default view is Item List, clicking an item navigates to Item Detail, direct URL navigation to Item Detail is possible, implement Item List and Item Details pages per specification, use the provided API, and avoid boilerplate like `create-react-app`.”
Read report →“Can you build a pub/sub web API that can scale to 200k RPS, with future capabilities for authentication and/or authorization, and a backend messaging system?”
Read report →“Can you explain the space and time complexity of the solution you just provided?”
Read report →“Could you build an API in Golang for a specific feature?”
Read report →“Can you explain what linked lists are and show some basic coding related to them?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 66 Mercari interview reports.