Rakuten Software Engineer interview experience

Early on, I had an assessment layer and then moved into multiple rounds where the focus stayed tightly on problem solving and engineering fundamentals. One part of the interview involved discussing how I would design things like data pipelines—collecting multiple sources into a lake—and connecting that to distributed systems and microservices architecture.

On top of that, the coding portion wasn’t framed as a trick; it was still practical and based on typical LeetCode-style tasks, with some rounds mentioning Python and SQL. I also got asked machine-learning related concepts like gradients