Rakuten Frontend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I went through 2 technical interviews and then a Hiring Manager round. It went well, and the manager seemed keen, spending about 45 minutes discussing the role, team, and company, before asking about my salary expectations. After that, I got no response from the recruiter despite a couple of emails. Strangely, the same recruiter then sent me another invite for the same position. I've since accepted a better offer elsewhere, as the recruiters here were quite unprofessional.

I applied online and after about a week, I received a Codility test. A couple of weeks later, I had a technical interview with two engineers from the team. They asked me about my past projects and also some technical questions. Since I'm comfortable speaking Japanese, about half of that interview was in Japanese. Then, after another two weeks, I had a second interview with the team manager, which was mostly about culture fit. They asked me to read some books by Mikitani if I passed. About two weeks after that, I had the final interview with the section manager.

Rakuten recruiter reached out to me, setting up a general phone screening to discuss my background and previous roles. About a week later, I was told the Front End Architect wanted a technical chat. The interviewer was knowledgeable and gave me an online coding assessment to complete within 20 minutes. Following that, we discussed my solution approach and I was asked several CSS, JQuery, and JavaScript questions. The session lasted 45 minutes, after which the interviewer mentioned passing feedback to the hiring manager. A week later, the recruiter delivered the news that I didn't get the offer.