Rakuten Software Engineer interview experience

The process started with document screening, then moved into a coding test and two interview rounds. In one round, motivation and fit came up, including why I wanted to work in Japan, and it was framed in a pretty relaxed way.

Across the technical discussions, the questions weren’t described as brutal LeetCode marathons. I remember solving standard LeetCode-style problems and then getting pulled into conversations about system design and behavioral topics. What helped was that interviewers paid attention to how I explained my thinking—whether my implementation was clean and how I reasoned