Rakuten Data Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I am currently studying at IIT Hyderabad. Rakuten came to my college for campus placements. The first round was a resume shortlist. The second round was a DSA round. The third round was a tech interview. I made it to the third round. Out of 220 applicants, there were only 2 vacancies. They only selected 8 people for the third round, and luckily I was one of them, but I didn't get selected.

The interview process was pretty fast, with 3 rounds in total. Two of these were quite technical. It was kind of a red flag that none of the interviewers talked about benefits, work culture, or other perks. When I got the offer, it was really lowballed, and it seemed like they were targeting desperate people who wanted to move to Japan with minimal pay. They were not willing to negotiate the offer.

The whole interview was tough. I applied on the rakuten website, but nothing happened for a while. I had to email someone from rakuten using an email I found on their internal candidate page for anything to happen. Then I got invited to do a codility test. My advice is to email them if you don't hear back after a week! I studied hard for the codility test, focusing on algorithmic counting and array/string manipulation, which turned out to be enough. I passed. Next was the first interview, which had a lot of basic SQL questions, as others have said, plus a live coding session and some behavioral questions. I passed that too. Then I had to take an English TOEIC test. I ended up failing the second interview, which was with a data team lead. He asked a lot about my work experience. He seemed positive about me afterwards, but I got rejected a couple of days later. I think it was because of my inexperienced answer about handling duplicate rows in a data pipeline. I'm sharing this so the next person can get the job. Glassdoor helped me prepare, but I still missed out, even though I was ready for some hard questions. I realized I wasn't ready for system design questions and that the interviewer thought I lacked experience in pipeline performance tuning and data operations. These are areas I need to work on. Keep interviewing; you'll find the right fit. I'll be looking elsewhere for now.