I had been working as a backend engineer in India for a few years, and I felt I had reached a limit in the kind of work I was seeing.
I wanted to work in a different market, with different engineering problems, and to learn more than I already knew. So I looked for international roles instead of only reading the usual local listings. I found a job platform focused on relocation, which filters for companies that sponsor visas and pay for the move, and I spent a few evenings each week going through the listings methodically. That is how I found Mercari in Tokyo. I had been following the company for some time. They were doing interesting things at scale, and the backend opening looked like a good fit. I applied through the platform and heard nothing for about ten days, and I was sure the application was dead. When they answered, the process had four structured rounds over about two months. The first was a live coding session where I shared my screen and solved problems in real time, the kind of session where your reasoning matters as much as the final answer. The second was a deep technical interview with an engineer, about architecture decisions and about how I think through microservices: trade-offs, failure modes, how I would ↓