I’m back in Mumbai as I write this recap of my summer spent in the heart of Tokyo, interning at Mercari. This post covers the internship itself; I’ve written about the travelling adventures separately.
About Mercari
Mercari is a C2C marketplace startup founded in 2013. In just 5 years, it skyrocketed to become Japan’s largest community-driven marketplace, earning pre-IPO unicorn status with a valuation over $1 billion. The company went public in June on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers Market – right during my stay there. Quite the timing.
The Office
The Mercari office is located on the 18th floor of Mori Tower, the 6th tallest building in Tokyo. The view from the office is fantastic and the breeze on the top, at the observation deck is better. There is a giant spider outside the office, that should remind you of Enemy if you’re into sci-fi.
The Honeymoon Phase
The first week was nothing short of overwhelming. Even for a honeymoon phase, things seemed too good to be true. The onboarding and orientation were smooth, and the gear was generous: company phones, portable Wi-Fi, and a $2000 MacBook Pro among other goodies.
We were assigned to our teams but were supposed to go through a week of orientation before beginning any work. The Global Operations Team took special effort to make us feel at home. They organised the multiple onboarding sessions and even took us out for a complete Tokyo tour on a weekday.
By week two, we were on our desks at our respective teams with the welcome balloons we received.
The Android Team
I had the pleasure of working with the JP Android Team, responsible for the main marketplace app – Mercari for Japan. It was a medium-sized team of just over 10 people. The bulk of my summer was spent implementing client-facing features on the Android app. I also tackled isolated issues across the codebase and took the initiative to improve code quality, which was well received by the team.
My team was largely global, consisting of a large number of Gaijins (Japanese for foreigners). I benefited hugely from this and learned how to work in a multi-cultural team. I learned the flow for how a spec moves to feature that gets shipped and how each detail in the middle matters.
On the technical side, this summer marked my first time implementing a software architecture from scratch, writing Kotlin, writing unit tests using Mockito and Robolectric, and setting up a CI automation task. Doing all of that in just over a month felt like a real achievement.
My team was great in many ways, apart from the mentor lunches that all of us interns were entitled to, the Android team had a weekly team lunch. My team even put together a special farewell dinner for me, after which we ended up going to Karaoke. There was also this beautiful parting gift I received from my team-
Experience
All in all, the experience was more than I could have asked for. Mercari was great to me, and it was a wild time to be there – between the IPO frenzy and the company’s 5th anniversary, I was lucky to attend all the parties.
I learned how to work efficiently in a team, picked up several technical skills, met a bunch of great people, got immersed in a completely new culture, and travelled as much as I could (more about that here).
Summer of ‘18 was one of the best summers I’ve had. Being home feels warm but itchy.