Rakuten Software Engineer interview experience

It stretched out for more than a month and then turned into a loop of invites and rescheduling that didn’t clearly map to a decision. I kept waiting for something concrete, but instead I hit repeated silence and, eventually, rejection without much clarity.

When I did reach interviews, they weren’t necessarily chaotic—some rounds went smoothly and felt polite—but the bigger issue was what happened around them. At one point I got the impression the requirements weren’t well aligned, with expectations that felt unrelated to the role (including a surprising emphasis on learning Japanese). In