This article is about my internship at Mercari Japan

Mercari, Inc. is a Japanese e-commerce company founded in 2013. Their main product, the Mercari marketplace app, was first launched in Japan in July 2013. Now grown to become Japan's largest community-powered marketplace with over JPY 10 billion in transactions carried out on the platform each month.

Intro

I am Pratik Singh, just a recent engineering pass-out from Bangalore.
In this blog post, I will describe the application process, the interview process, and my experience working at this company.

My Story

In this section, I will discuss my story with Mercari. Well, back in 2021 I decided I wanted to work as a DevOps engineer rather than a SDE. After this decision, I started to focus only on such openings.

While scrolling LinkedIn I came across a post about this company. Lucky for me, while stalking the company I found an opening fit for me.

Selection Process

• The Application 🗒 :

I applied for CI/CD Engineer Opening from LinkedIn: Here
No referrals, I applied directly.

• Coding Test 💻 :

The journey of an application followed by a test link of Hackerrank (my last employer😅). There were two questions as far as I recall. The time provided was reasonable and the questions were of an appropriate level (Codeforces A and B level questions). Nothing related to DevOps was asked up till now.

• Technical Interview ⚔️ :

The first technical round was 90 mins. It was mostly around DevOps questions. We started by discussing my projects, followed up by my past internships. My experience did elp me out. We focused our conversation on tools like GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes, Datadog, and more. It went on for like 2 hours and it was a great interview.

I like technical interviews. If I can answer their questions, my confidence boosts. If I don't know the answers, I learn something new.
P.S.: Don't be afraid of interviews.

• Interview with Manager 🙇🏻 :

The next round was scheduled a couple of days later with the Manager. It was for 90 mins or so. He is a very wise person with a comforting nature. The interview was a mix of technical and cultural fit questions. I was asked about my experience with DevOps and CI tools. Also was asked to tell instances from my experience. It was not much technical but I sure had to think a lot before I answered. Reading the blogs my manager had published helped me to drive a better conversation 😉.

• HR Round 👩🏻‍🦳:

Well, not to tell much in this. She was impressed that I worked for Hackerrank. HR just discussed my days of availability for 3 months. If I am willing to relocate to Japan or not. It was a simple conversion than an interview, to be honest.

• Selected!🎉🔥

My Experience

At Mercari for 3 months, I worked in the CI/CD team. This team works under the Platforms team. We focused to build tools and pipelines to ease the work of Developers working in Mercari. My work initially was to get to know the different tools and the company's setup. I implemented several things around Go and helped in FinOps. My primary project was to build a Migration tool. This helped them to migrate an entire CI pipeline from CI tool A to Tool B (can't officially declare names). It not only migrated the pipeline but also helped the team monitor and observe which projects migrated.

Working with an international team was an awesome experience! I went to Japan for a week and worked remotely from India for the rest. There was a time zone difference but my team was very considerate and helped me a lot. The tasks that were assigned to me, were first discussed with me. I could choose the task I want to complete as per the learning involved in them! I learned a lot and had an experience of a lifetime. Speaking of money, you can find them on the Internet. All I can say is what I earned in a 6 months internship even that was less than their monthly stipend😅

My Conclusion

Mercari is an amazing place to be working at! You will learn a lot of DevOps practices. Honestly, the usage of IAC and other implementations I had not seen or even read somewhere. This place has a culture to let people experiment but not at the cost of security. I have a special place for Japan and company in my life!