The entire interview process was rigorous. I applied through the Rakuten recruiting website directly. Initially, nothing was done with my application. It was only after I tried to contact someone from Rakuten from an e-mail I found on the candidate page of the internal recruitment website, where you logged in, that something happened. I suddenly got invited to do a Codility test.

Advice to potential job seekers: Send an e-mail to this very well-hidden e-mail on the candidate home page after a week of hearing nothing!

I prepared for the Codility test by studying all the material at Codility. It turns out (rightly so) that you only need to know algorithmic counting and array/string manipulation. It is still a nice exercise to have a basic understanding of algorithms. I passed the Codility test.

After the Codility test, I got invited to the first interview. This interview, as somebody else has also put it on Glassdoor, was full of basic SQL questions. See questions below for some of those that I still remember. There was also a live coding session. See interview questions below for details. Finally, there were some behavioral questions. The few I still remember are in the interview questions below.

I passed the first interview. I got invited to take an English TOEIC test. Which I originally planned to do if I passed the second interview, but I ended up NOT passing the second interview.

The second interview was with a Data Team Lead. He had lots of questions related to your work experience. See below for details on the questions I still remember.

After the second interview, I heard from the interviewer that he was positive about me. Two days later, I got a rejection letter. The only reason I can think of is my inexperienced response to his duplicate row data pipeline question.

I wrote this review here such that the next guy can get the job. Glassdoor helped me prepare fairly well for the interview process, but I still got rejected even though I got some of the hard questions fully prepared. I found out later that I was not prepared to answer system design-like questions. The interviewer also thought that I missed data operations experience, since it looked like I did not have that much experience doing pipeline performance tuning.

These are areas I could improve in for the next interview.

Keep interviewing. At some point, there will be a company that fits you....

I will be looking for my next job outside of Rakuten for now.

Codility task 1: Hard LeetCode SQL question. (Just practice a few hard LeetCode SQL questions). They are not hard if you practice a few.

Codility task 2: Python problem related to counting the possible number of strings (permutations) that satisfy a certain condition.

Interview 1: How do you handle data skew?

Interview 1: How do you rate yourself in PySpark on a scale of 1 to 10?

Interview 1: How do you convince your colleagues/business to adapt a new technology?

Interview 1: Live coding 1: You get some CSV text. You need to parse it and then generate a query to calculate something. This is a medium-hard SQL question.

Interview 1: Live coding 2: Python question. Count the number of vowels in a string.

Interview 1: Name a challenging data engineering problem you have solved.

Interview 1: Tell us about what tech stack you use.

Interview 2: How did you approach architecting in your former roles?

Interview 2: I have a production pipeline that analysts consume. It could show duplicates. How do you solve this?

Interview 2: How do you do data governance?

Interview 2: How do you ensure data quality?