- What made you choose Mercari to launch your career?There are three reasons I chose Mercari.The first is that I felt Mercari was a place where I would be able to push my skills to the limit. I majored in computer science and machine learning at university and through my studies I had the opportunity to work on a PoC for a machine learning project, so I decided that I would try to become an engineer after graduating. If I was going to be an engineer, I wanted to work for a company where I could really build my skills. That’s why I became interested in Mercari—I knew that they emphasized investing in engineering and had already attracted many highly skilled engineers. (This was my impression of Mercari before joining the company, and these expectations were met. I work alongside a team of the talented engineers who use sophisticated development platforms, so I have been able to work in the world of modern software engineering with virtually no stress.) In addition, when I was an intern at Mercari in 2017, the company had just started to place more emphasis on machine learning, so my thinking was that Mercari would allow me to take on highly challenging engineering tasks only possible in a startup environment. Not only was the sheer volume of data handled by Mercari impressive to me, much of it is also unique due to the nature of operating a C2C service, so I had high expectations that that there was very interesting work available for machine learning engineers at Mercari.The second reason I wanted to join Mercari is that I had a great experience as an intern here. At Mercari, objectives and key results (OKRs) are set at the company, team, and individual levels. We interns were required to set OKRs that were just as vital to the company as our full-time peers, which actually allowed us a great deal of freedom and impact—even as interns. The feedback we received from our mentors was also very practical, so I was able to learn things that have actually helped me in my career. This was a major factor in my decision to join the company.Lastly, the product was just so impressive to me. The Mercari marketplace app has a tremendous number of users, and one of the thoughts that attracted me to Mercari as a company was the potential opportunity to make a large impact on the business.
- Could you describe your career at Mercari?I joined the company as a machine learning engineer on the TnS (Trust and Safety) Team, developing machine learning systems to do things like detect items that violate Mercari’s terms of service. I experienced a lot of failure in this field, but I also experienced a lot of success—even becoming tech lead. Also, not to get too technical, but I think that a huge benefit to my career was that I got to experience not only the development of machine learning models, but also development of everything related to MLOps, including CI/CD, feedback loops, monitoring, and more, all in the span of about a year or two. Another thing that really stands out in my memory is when we wrote a report on our findings from developing services and went to a conference to present it.About a year ago, I transferred to the Recommendation Team to work on improving the logic of Mercari's home screen. As our job is to recommend things like items and listings that our users will be interested in, our KPIs are naturally the number of purchases and item sales, and I love being able to see the impact of the features we have developed reflected directly in those numbers.
- Lastly, do you have a message for anyone who is struggling with some aspect of their early career?I think my message would be that it’s easier to get an impression of what it will be like after joining a company if you are able to get an insider perspective. So I recommend proactively pursuing internships and other such opportunities once you have narrowed down what kind of work you want to do. I think that this way you can feel secure in whatever decision you make!
