Data Science Department - Data Science Engineer Rakuten Employee Review

1.0
1 Aug 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free lunch, gym, and most of engineers are nice.

Cons

- The department director told us that sometimes people without qualification in data science have better results than scientists with master or doctor degrees; - They promote new graduate in no related field to management position which are causing high qualified engineers to quit. Sometime entire team leaves the company in less than 2 years (senior managers, team manager, product owner, scrum master, data engineer, front-end engineer, and everyone) - They change the department team configuration each quarter. They rotate managers, leaders, and engineers every time making difficult to aggregate value for the company - The managers changes every quarter making very difficult to have a efficient employee evaluation. E.g. the definition of success changes making difficult to know what is delivable, success, failure, and direction of the project - They promote people based on stereotypes or friendship. This is what makes good workers to quit. I saw one engineer who was unhappy with the company working in his own application (for his 2nd job) during the work and doing bad design (knowing that is bad design) for the company and destroyed entire project. Since the managers does not understand technical things, he blames the team members and promoted this engineer to manager without knowing that the cause of project failure was this bad engineer. They prometed because he had good reputation before join this team. Result, everyone quit the company. - They pay highest salary just because the new graduate has MBA. I think it is ok to accelerate the career path for those who shows good results. But, i saw several cases that in 2 years they did not done anything at all. This is a extension of employee evaluation process + bad directors /managers. - For some reason, bullies are promoted and honest employee get more responsibility without promotion. I saw one team leader who just read emails all the day, does not accept responsibility, always blame his team for failure, manipulates the truth in his benefit, and bully getting promoted to manager. I saw honest people with their career and reputation destroyed by them. - Most of projects does not complete because all key person left the company. What left are the manipulators which does not have real skills

Explore other reviews about Rakuten

5.0
25 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Rakuten Rewards has great life balance. Too bad the economy was getting rocked.

Cons

Don't really have any cons. I understand that the market's been hard so had to downsize the force, so that was kinda challenging. Hopefully AI will increase everyone's output.

3.0
28 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The company offers great benefits and perks, and the overall work culture can be fun and social. When I first joined, it felt like a positive place to work and a good environment to learn. It’s a solid company to start your career, especially if you’re early on and want exposure to the role.

Cons

While the experience started off strong, there was very little room for growth long term. Opportunities were not distributed equally across the team, and favoritism was noticeable at times. The same individuals were consistently praised for simply doing their jobs, while others’ contributions were rarely acknowledged. The team culture could feel very cliquey, and if you weren’t part of the “favorites,” it was difficult to be recognized or considered for new opportunities. Although leadership often spoke about internal growth and mobility, in reality those opportunities felt extremely limited. Once you’re placed on a team, it’s very hard to move into something new or grow beyond that role. This is a good place to start your career and gain experience, but not a place I would recommend staying long term. If you’re looking for growth, development, and mobility within the company, you may find yourself feeling stuck.

3
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