Rakuten Engineer in Singapore: a two-week loop with Merge k Sorted Lists, Divide Two Integers, a banking app design and Spring Boot and React questions

I interviewed for Rakuten in Singapore at the start of this year, after being contacted by an in house recruiter. The interview process felt very fast, 2 weeks total from when I did the OA to the final round.

First stage was the online assessment which was 2 normal medium DSA LeetCode questions:

• Merge K sorted lists

• Divide two integers without the division operator

Then followed with an onsite interview which had two rounds, one technical and one behavioral. The technical round was system design whiteboarding, some technical questions and another LC. The system design whiteboarding was to design a scalable banking app.

Some of the technical questions they asked were:

• How to structure a clean REST endpoint in Spring Boot

• How to handle conditional rendering logic for a custom button component in React

• LC question was how would you find the 2nd largest element in an array

Last part was a chat with the hiring manager where he went through my CV and asked about past projects and discussed technical fit. He told me what the team were working on at the moment and asked if I had any other questions. Very friendly chat and felt like I had the job at that stage.