My Internship Experience at Mercari Japan

To tell you a little bit about the organization, Mercari is an eCommerce company founded in 2013. Its main product is a C2C marketplace app where users can buy and sell products and it has grown to become Japan’s largest community-powered marketplace with over 10 billion JPY in transactions each month. Okay, enough about the company, let’s dig into my internship experience.

Selection Process

I applied via their careers portal for the Summer Internship position without a referral! Immediately, I received a Hackerrank test link. There were 4–5 questions of easy-medium level in the span of 1 hour. I was able to solve all of them.

After two weeks, I received an invitation for a technical round of interviews. This round was taken up by an Android Tech lead. To my surprise, there were no questions related to DSA/core subjects in the interview, it was all about testing my android knowledge and discussing the projects I made. The questions were on different android concepts like Dependency Injection, architecture patterns, Kotlin, and unit testing. It was my first android interview and hence was a great learning experience for me.

After another week, I received an invitation for my next round of interviews which was a managerial round. This round was taken by an Engineering Manager. It was all about my cultural fit to the organization and typical hypothetical situation-based questions. After three weeks, I got my selection email. I never expected that I would be able to bag an international internship.

Mercari invites all of their interns to Japan for the internship but due to COVID’19, it was virtual for me. This was the most and only unfortunate thing for me in this internship that I was not able to experience in Japan.

Onboarding

As part of my onboarding, I received a Macbook Pro 16-inch, and some swags (a t-shirt, and a hoodie). The onboarding process was a smooth one for me. I got my laptop set up through an online PC set-up session. After that, I got onboarded to my team as an Android Developer.

Team & Work Culture

I was a part of the Personalization team which was responsible for handling the Home and Search screen of the Mercari android app. In the initial week, I was given a code walkthrough (though it was extremely tough to understand it as it was huge) by my mentor Abhinav Joshi.

My team was of medium size with around 9 people including other interns as well. It was a multi-cultured team with members from different countries. It was a very nice experience working with them and learning about their culture. One of the best things about Mercari is you have lots of team lunches(2–3 per week).

It was very nice interacting with them and knowing their culture. The work culture at Mercari is pretty amazing. People here are extremely humble and welcoming. I got to work with really talented people and learned a lot from them.

Work

Initially, I was responsible for some bug fixes and after that worked on three features. After the features were completed, we were allowed to pick any tickets from the JIRA board based on their priorities. I was given ownership of all the features I worked on and I handled them pretty well.

On the technical side, I learned quite a few things like working on MVP & MVVM architecture, writing kotlin code, dependency injection using Dagger and Hilt, Jetpack Compose, and also wrote some unit tests as well. Also, for the first time, I did some code reviews as well. During the internship, I got to learn many new things on both the technical and managerial sides.

Things other than work

So, Mercari provides a language program for all their employees (including interns) who wants to learn Japanese or English. I thought let’s give it a try and learn some Japanese. I was enrolled in a class with 4 other people and the teacher. I must say, the Japanese teacher was pretty amazing in the way she taught us Japanese. It was all about interacting with each other in Japanese and slowly teaching us different words and expressions. Though Japanese was quite hard to speak and listen (don’t even think of writing or reading), it was a very insightful and fun experience.

Overall Experience

Mercari was my best internship experience so far. In the span of 4 months, I got to learn many new things, worked with some amazing people, and interacted with a bunch of people of different nationalities and cultures. Wish I could experience this all in Japan. Maybe, next time!!

Want to join Mercari, feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin or check out the careers page