Hello, everyone! I’m Kayoreena from the Engineering Office.

In this edition of #MercariDays, I’m here to tell you all about a new and exciting project.
As was officially announced today, Mercari will be establishing a Center of Excellence for engineers in Bengaluru, India this summer—scheduled to open in June 2022. These engineers will be helping us further grow Japan’s largest CtoC platform.

Mercari to Establish Center of Excellence in India Opening in June, the new center represents another step toward becoming a true global tech company and will support Mercari’s international endeavors

Many members from many different teams were involved in this project to make this new development center a reality—the project’s Slack channel had over 270 members! Of course, there is still a lot to get done before June, but I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you why we decided to establish a Center of Excellence in Bengaluru as well as our hopes for this project.

Hiring engineers and gaining a competitive edge

Bengaluru is a hot spot for tech companies, including this tech park with a collection of buildings that are home to many tech offices.

First, why did we decide to establish a new Center of Excellence? The answer lies in our organization’s history, and the changes surrounding the tech industry today.

As is probably true for many of you, the COVID-19 pandemic has completely transformed the way we work. Especially in the tech industry, companies started recommending remote work at a very early stage in the pandemic. This change in working environment has allowed more engineers the opportunity to work remotely across borders. As the demand for engineers grows globally, it is becoming increasingly important to enhance our organizational capabilities and hire top talent.

Mercari has focused on hiring diverse engineers from all over the world ever since its founding, in order to build a strong development organization. As a result of these efforts, roughly 50% of the engineering organization at Mercari’s Tokyo office is comprised of non-Japanese engineers, hailing from 40 different countries. Even among these countries, we have welcomed many engineers from India in particular.

Family Party held in Mumbai in April 2018: We invited new members and their families to celebrate them joining Mercari all together.

Mercari’s global hiring activities went into full swing from 2017, but we have focused on India specifically from the very beginning, as it was garnering attention for its world-class technological capabilities. Among the overseas new grad hires in October 2018, we had the most graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology, with 29 graduates moving to Japan to join our Tokyo office.

Our more senior members have also played a huge role in the growth of Mercari’s engineering organization, and such experienced members with standout leadership skills led this project of establishing the India Center of Excellence.

It goes without saying that the journey of growing our engineering organization was not always smooth sailing. Building an organization capable of establishing a development center abroad required years of preparation. Ensuring technological capability is a must, but in addition to that, there were various other hurdles to overcome along the way—we needed to establish foundations to enhance our organizational capabilities, conduct internal language and communication trainings, and have countless discussions with executives on our evaluation system, just to name a few. And now, in 2022, we have finally reached the stage of establishing a Center of Excellence in Bengaluru, India to further enhance our engineering capabilities.

To the start of a new journey, and the colleagues we’ll meet along the way

Project members Mohan, Junichi, Ken, Kayo, and Jatin in Bengaluru

Establishing an overseas development center comes with many difficulties, since you are faced with making both minor and major decisions, and because you run into many firsts. However, we are confident that our new colleagues waiting for us in India will make all the hardships worthwhile. For some of the project members, it was their first time visiting Bengaluru. Feeling the energy of the young people living there and interacting with the highly skilled tech talent during visits, it filled us with hope and excitement for our new Center of Excellence. The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted society in many ways, but our engineering organization aims to adapt and respond to these changes as appropriate, and take on this next step of our journey to continue to grow.

To end, I’d like to share some comments from two of the project members involved in establishing the India Center of Excellence.

The journey of our India Center of Excellence has only just started. We won’t be able to succeed in this journey on our own—we invite you to take on this new challenge with us, in order to achieve our global mission and as an opportunity to further your career. We are looking forward to meeting people who are just as excited as us to write the new chapter of Mercari’s history!

See here for information about hiring
Link to hiring page

Please follow us on LinkedIn, as we’ll continue posting updates on the India Center of Excellence!

See here for our LinkedIn page
LinkedIn Page

That’s all from me. I hope you enjoyed this edition of #MercariDays!

Engineering Manager
Software Engineer