Mercari Software Engineer interview experience

In the early interview, I mixed coding with discussion about how I’d worked before, and I could feel they were trying to understand both my execution and my thought process.

After that, I had another technical round with coding paired with a deeper dive, and then the final step was system design with an engineering manager. The conversations weren’t frantic; they were more structured and “let’s reason through it” than pure trivia. In total it took about a month, and the cadence between rounds felt reasonably fast, with feedback and scheduling happening quickly enough that I wasn’t left in