From India to Tokyo: a backend engineer offer at Mercari in four rounds

I'd been working as a backend engineer in India for a few years and felt like I'd hit a ceiling on the kind of exposure I was getting. I wanted to work in a different market, take on genuinely different engineering problems, and push myself past what I already knew. So I started targeting international roles specifically instead of just scrolling the usual local listings. I found a relocation-focused job platform that filtered for companies willing to sponsor and relocate candidates, and I spent a few evenings a week working through listings methodically. That's how Mercari in Tokyo showed up. I'd been following the company for a while. They were doing interesting things at scale, and the backend opening looked like a real fit. I applied through the platform and heard nothing for about ten days, which had me convinced it had gone nowhere. When they did come back, the process ran in four structured rounds over roughly two months. The first was a live coding screen where I shared my screen and worked through problems in real time, the kind of session where your thought process counts as much as the final answer. The second was a deep technical interview with an engineer, focused on architecture decisions and how I reason about ↓