How to Apply to Mercari

About Mercari

Application Process

1. 1
   Discover the role: Mercari publishes all openings in two places

   Discover the role: Mercari publishes all openings in two places — careers.mercari.com (their bilingual in-house careers site, with English and Japanese views and rich filtering by job category, employment type, business unit, office, and seniority) and the underlying Workable board at mercari.workable.com. The careers site is the better discovery experience; clicking 'Apply' on any role hands you off to Workable to actually submit. As of 2026, openings are split across roughly 24 engineering roles and 48 business/product/corporate roles, plus a continuous new-graduate intake (Class of 2028).

2. 2
   Read the job description carefully

   Read the job description carefully — both the English JD and the language requirement. Mercari's job descriptions explicitly state required and preferred CEFR levels for Japanese and English. Most engineering and many product roles require English at B2 (Independent) and Japanese only at A2 (Basic) or no Japanese at all. Some Merpay, Mercoin, and Mercari Hallo roles that touch Japanese regulatory or customer-facing surfaces require Japanese at B2 or higher. Do not over-apply — the Recruiting team at Mercari is explicit that they want candidates whose language profile matches the role.

3. 3
   Prepare your application materials in either English or Japanese

   Prepare your application materials in either English or Japanese — Mercari has no required document format. Their official guidance is to submit a concise summary of work history with the businesses and projects you've worked on, the role you played, results you achieved, and the goals and vision you'd like to pursue at Mercari. A clean one-to-two-page resume plus an optional cover letter or LinkedIn link is the standard package. For engineering roles, link your GitHub if you have meaningful public code.

4. 4
   Submit through Workable at apply

   Submit through Workable at apply.workable.com/mercari/. The Workable form asks for your name, email, phone, location, resume upload (PDF strongly preferred), and a small number of role-specific questions including work authorization, language self-assessment, and sometimes a short 'why Mercari' free-text field. You can apply with a LinkedIn or Indeed profile to autofill, but always upload a polished PDF resume — autofill data is rarely formatted the way an ATS keyword scan needs it.

5. 5
   Document screening: A recruiter reviews your application against the role requir

   Document screening: A recruiter reviews your application against the role requirements, with particular attention to the four values, language fit, and direct experience evidence. Mercari does this in-house — they do not use external recruiting firms for most roles — and turnaround typically lands inside one to two weeks. If the role has a high applicant volume (Software Engineer, Product Manager, Designer, Data Scientist), expect closer to two weeks.

6. 6
   Skill assessment: For engineering positions, you will be asked to complete a cod

   Skill assessment: For engineering positions, you will be asked to complete a coding assessment on HackerRank or to submit/walk through GitHub work. Mercari is explicit about this in their published recruitment process. The assessment is calibrated to the level of the role — junior assessments are algorithmic, senior assessments often involve a short take-home or a system-design discussion. For non-engineering roles, an assessment may be requested depending on the position (case study for product, design challenge for designers, written exercise for some business roles); the timing may coincide with the interview process rather than precede it.

7. 7
   First interview (recruiter or hiring manager screen): Typically 45–60 minutes vi

   First interview (recruiter or hiring manager screen): Typically 45–60 minutes via Google Meet. Covers your background, why Mercari, language self-assessment in practice (the recruiter may switch into your weaker language briefly to gauge actual level — be honest about your CEFR), and a high-level walkthrough of your most recent role. Expect explicit STAR-format questions tied to the four values.

8. 8
   Technical or functional interviews: Two to three rounds, each 45–90 minutes, dep

   Technical or functional interviews: Two to three rounds, each 45–90 minutes, depending on level and discipline. Engineers typically face one coding interview (live or assessment review), one system-design interview, and one cross-functional collaboration interview. PMs face product sense, execution, and analytical/metric rounds. Designers do a portfolio walkthrough and a design exercise discussion. Data scientists face a technical case plus a stats/SQL round. All technical rounds are conducted in English unless the role is Japanese-required.

9. 9
   Values and culture interview: One dedicated round (45–60 minutes) led by a hirin

   Values and culture interview: One dedicated round (45–60 minutes) led by a hiring manager or senior cross-functional partner whose explicit job is to evaluate the four values — Go Bold, All for One, Be a Pro, Move Fast — using the STAR method. This is not a soft round. Mercari publishes the exact STAR question framework on their recruitment-selection page, and weak answers here have killed otherwise strong candidates. Prepare three to five concrete stories per value with quantified results.

10. 10
    Final interview: With a department head or executive (for senior roles, often a

    Final interview: With a department head or executive (for senior roles, often a VP or C-level). Covers strategic fit, long-term career goals, compensation expectations, and any final concerns from earlier rounds. For very senior roles this can be more of a two-way conversation than an evaluation.

11. 11
    Reference check: Mercari conducts online reference checks around the time of the

    Reference check: Mercari conducts online reference checks around the time of the final interview. They will ask you to provide referees (typically 2–3 former managers or close colleagues) and contact them directly. This is a real check, not a formality — answers materially influence the offer decision, and Mercari has been known to slow down or pull offers based on reference signal.

12. 12
    Offer: Offers are determined carefully in consideration of the final interview a

    Offer: Offers are determined carefully in consideration of the final interview and the reference check. Compensation is base salary plus a fixed overtime allowance (covering up to 45 hours/month of overtime — standard Japanese employment law structure), with twice-yearly salary reviews (April and October), incentive bonuses (March and September), stock options for employees above a certain grade, and the Merci Box benefits package. Probationary period is three months at the same conditions as a permanent employee.

13. 13
    Onboarding: Once you accept, you will sign with Mercari, Inc

    Onboarding: Once you accept, you will sign with Mercari, Inc. as your legal employer (even if you'll be working at Merpay or Mercoin, you are seconded from Mercari, Inc.). Visa sponsorship is offered for international hires for roles where Mercari has determined that immigration support is in scope — this is explicit in the job description, not assumed. Relocation support and a generous benefits package (Merci Box, language learning, hybrid work) are part of the package.

Resume Tips for Mercari

Interview Culture

What Mercari Looks For

• Go Bold in practice: candidates who have taken meaningful risk in their careers — joined unproven products, owned outcomes outside their comfort zone, made decisions with incomplete information — and can articulate both what they learned from failures and what they shipped from successes
• All for One collaboration: candidates who explicitly credit teams, partners, and stakeholders in their stories, who have evidence of cross-functional impact, and who do not pattern-match as lone-wolf operators
• Be a Pro in a specialty: deep, demonstrated expertise in your craft — engineers with strong systems thinking and shipped code at scale, PMs with sharp product sense, designers with shipped craft, data scientists with rigorous methodology and meaningful applied impact
• Move Fast: evidence that you ship — concrete cycle times, launches, iterations, and a bias toward action over deliberation. Mercari penalizes 'analyze for six months then propose' patterns
• Genuine alignment with the mission of 'circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people' — not just lip service. Candidates who can articulate why they care about this mission, in their own words, and ideally with a personal story, stand out
• Bilingual or biculturally-comfortable mindset, even if monolingual: ability to operate in an environment where English and Japanese coexist, where colleagues come from 50+ countries, and where 'meeting halfway' in communication is an explicit cultural value
• Comfort with ambiguity and product evolution: Mercari is a multi-business-unit company with several products (Merpay, Mercoin, Hallo, US) at very different stages, and roles can shift as the business shifts. Candidates who are flexible about scope and energized by change do well
• For engineering roles specifically: production experience with microservices on Kubernetes, strong fundamentals in Go or a comparable language, comfort with Google Cloud Platform, and exposure to Spanner, BigQuery, and modern observability tooling
• Honest, calibrated self-assessment of language ability using CEFR and of seniority — Mercari interviewers can tell when candidates oversell, and undersell, and react badly to both
• Curiosity about the Japanese consumer market and cross-cultural product design — particularly for product, design, and business roles where understanding why Mercari succeeded in Japan is part of the job
• Clear, specific career intent: candidates who can articulate why this specific role at this specific business unit (not just 'a PM job at Mercari') and what they want to learn or build over the next two to three years

Open Positions

Mercari currently has 2 open positions.

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