Garena final interview: fit and behavioral

Read before the interview, not during it. Green blocks are what you say out loud. Brackets are details only you know: fill them with what's true before Thursday.

Before you walk in

What they're looking for

Your known habit: too much context before the point. Rule for Thursday: first sentence answers the question. STAR stories in about 90 seconds; everything else in about 45.

Tell me about yourself

About 60 seconds. Ends on the thread that connects everything, and on focus.

Hello, I'm Marcelo, nice to meet you. I'm from Curitiba, I'm finishing my degree in Business Administration this December, and I'm moving to São Paulo in January. During college, I spent a year and a half at a consulting firm as a data engineering intern, building pipelines to automate financial statements with AI. In parallel, I built a few projects of my own: AI customer service agents for restaurants and hotels, a GEO tool for hotels, which is basically SEO for AI, a cattle counting computer vision model, and a pre-owned luxury watch business where I handled pricing and negotiation. What connects all of it is data, pricing and fast decisions. And I've always been a gamer, so game operations is exactly where those things meet. That's why, if I join Garena, it will have my full focus.

Why Garena, why Operations

"Why Garena?"
Three reasons. First, scale. Free Fire is one of the largest games in Brazil, one of the most played mobile games in the world, and Brazil is one of its biggest markets, so the decisions here really matter. And with the ECA Digital, Brazil is where the monetization model is being rethought first. Second, Brazil has a real voice inside Garena. The Baile do Jaguar this year was the first global campaign for Free Fire created in Brazil, and I want to work where the local team shapes the global product. And third, the global side. I've already worked with partners in Spain and really enjoyed it, so daily syncs with other markets sound like the job I want, not a burden.
"Why Operations, and not Marketing?"
I'm more drawn to what happens after players are already in the game. Marketing brings players in and builds the brand, and that's essential, but Operations decides what they find once they're there: the events, the economy, what the game offers and at what price, and catching problems fast when something breaks. I've already been making those decisions on a much smaller scale. At the watch business, I set prices, and I learned that a price is part data, part psychology. At the consulting firm, I built the data pipelines that show whether a decision actually worked. In Free Fire, it's the same loop of deciding, measuring and adjusting, just with millions of players, and you see the result the next day.
"Why gaming?"
Because it's been part of my life since I was a kid. I grew up playing Counter-Strike with friends, and I've played a lot of battle royales: almost 300 hours of PUBG and around 800 hours of Fortnite, where I also spent the most money on skins. I played Free Fire during the battle royale boom, and lately I've also been into management games like Civilization. What I love about games is that they're social, and that every decision in them is visible: you change a price or an event, and millions of players react the next day. I can't think of a better place to work with data and pricing.

Use only what's true about your gaming history. Add what you're playing now.

"Why should we hire you?"
Three things. I already think in revenue terms: pricing, conversion, spend per player, and I think I showed that in the take home and the case. I build with data and AI, from data pipelines to a computer vision model. And I'm a gamer who cares about the player experience, not just the numbers. On top of that, having run my own projects, I'm used to owning a problem from start to finish.

Your projects and commitment

The most likely topic. Calm, short, concrete. Everything must match the form you signed: no outside commitments, yes to exclusivity, nothing continues if you're hired.

Over-explaining makes the concern sound real. Answer in four or five sentences and stop.
"If you join Garena, what happens to your projects? And your clients?"
That's a fair question, I'd be thinking the same in your place. Garena would have my full focus, and I've already committed to exclusivity in the form. The GEO project is at a very early stage and has no running clients, so it would be very easy to pull the plug. My luxury watch resale business has very little demand, so it would also be easy to discontinue. And the international trade company in Spain: my entry was only planned for January, so I just won't go ahead with it. During this last year, I mainly worked on their digital presence and brand, and the other partners can easily take that over, so neither they nor their clients would be left without support.

If the GEO tool has any client running today, say in one sentence how it will be handed over or wrapped up. Keep it consistent with what you told the hiring manager.

"The form says you have no outside commitments, but you told us about the company in Spain."
Yes, totally. Both are true: I'm not a partner of that company. My entry was only planned for January, so today I have no commitment there, and that's why I answered no. As I said, Garena would be my number one priority, especially since I agreed to an exclusivity clause. So I just won't go ahead with joining the company in Spain. The partners can absorb the share I was going to get and my part of the work, so the company will be fine, and I'll be completely focused on Garena.
"Why go corporate after building your own businesses?"
That's a fair question. Building my own projects taught me a lot, but always at a small scale and mostly on my own. What I'm looking for now is depth: working in a team and learning from it, in a place where decisions affect millions of players. That's exactly why I'm choosing to go corporate now: in any of the businesses I've built, or that I could build in the near future, I wouldn't get that kind of depth.
"Won't you miss being an entrepreneur? How do we know you won't leave in a year to start another company?"
Honestly, what I want right now is to understand and learn how a company of this scale works. I want to be in touch with millions of data points from millions of players and understand how decisions are made from them, and also how a global team works together. For me, that's worth more than anything I could build alone. And I don't see this as a one-year stop: that kind of learning takes years, and I'm already making the decisions that show it, moving to São Paulo and closing my projects. I think my entrepreneurial side becomes an advantage here, because I'm used to owning problems end to end, and that's what I want to bring to the team.
"Isn't it a problem to leave your partners and clients behind?"
I take it seriously, and that's why I've already talked to my partners about it. For my watch clients, I can point them to other luxury watch dealers I trust and have worked closely with. At the trade company in Spain, the clients are handled by the other partners, and the partners themselves aren't really being left behind: I know they can do the work I was doing and keep building the company. So the company won't be affected. And I'd rather make a clean decision now than split my attention later.

Only say you talked to your partners if you did. If not, talk to them before Thursday.

Values: STAR stories

About 90 seconds each: situation in 2 sentences, your actions with "I", result with a number, one sentence of learning. Sea's values: We Serve, We Adapt, We Run, We Commit, We Stay Humble. Don't use the same story twice.

We Serve: "A time you went out of your way for a customer."
A time I went out of my way to serve a customer was with a pizza place that was a client of my WhatsApp AI automation business. Our AI bot needed to send their menu as a PDF on WhatsApp so customers could order, but they didn't have one, and they didn't have anyone to make it. It wasn't part of what we had sold them, but without it, the project couldn't launch. So I used AI to scrape their website, where they had an online version of the menu, but it was disorganized and even had some flavors grouped wrong. I turned it into a structured file with each flavor, its description and its image, fixed the mistakes, wrote an HTML version of the menu, and converted it to PDF. In two days, the client had a menu they could send to their customers, and our bots could send it too, so we were able to launch. What I took from it is that if the client's problem blocks the result, it's my problem too, even when it's outside the scope.
We Adapt: "A time things weren't going as planned and you changed direction."
A time something wasn't going as planned and I changed direction was on that same WhatsApp automation project. We had too many complaints about AI hallucinations, including mistakes on critical order data, and we also saw that many customers simply didn't want to talk to an AI. So instead of patching it, my partner and I decided to stop the product and look at what was actually working: we had hotel clients and we knew how to work with AI. So we turned it into a GEO tool for hotels, basically SEO for AI: it monitors how hotels show up in answers from tools like ChatGPT. The logic was that on WhatsApp, an AI mistake became a wrong order for a real customer. In the new tool, the AI only monitors, so a mistake never reaches the end customer. What I learned is that even when we plan for every scenario, plans can break, and the sooner you notice it and admit it, the less it costs to change.

Leave out client numbers for the GEO tool, or use only what's true today. It must match what you said in the last interview (very early stage).

We Commit: "A time you took ownership of a hard problem."
A time I took ownership of a problem that was hard to solve was at BPM Watches, my business reselling secondhand luxury watches. We sent a watch that was on consignment with us, worth [value], to a buyer in Minas Gerais through Correios. Even though we had insurance, Correios lost it and refused to pay the claim. So I did three things. First, I paid the original owner back out of my own pocket. Second, I formally apologized to the buyer and returned his money. Third, I sued Correios, since they never took responsibility. [Status of the lawsuit.] But the part I could control is done: neither the owner nor the buyer lost anything. What I learned is that when something goes wrong, the client shouldn't pay for it, even when the mistake wasn't mine.
We Run: "A time you delivered something fast with limited resources."
A time I had to deliver something fast was when I had to build a computer vision model to count cattle in under a week. A friend and I had been discussing the idea for a few months, and then he came to me and said he had someone interested, and we needed an MVP to show him. Since he's on the sales side, I had to build the whole product. First, I cut the scope to what the client needed to see: a simple dashboard where the client would upload a drone video filming cattle from above, and the system would count them. Then I used AI coding tools on my desktop, which has a good GPU, to train a YOLO model using a pre-labeled dataset of drone footage over livestock from Roboflow. In under a week, we had an MVP that counted cattle with about 95% accuracy, which the client said was better than their manual counts. What I learned is that speed comes from cutting the scope down to what proves the idea, and from using the right tools for the job.

Have a short, neutral sentence ready on why you didn't continue, in case they ask.

We Stay Humble: "A time you received critical feedback."
A time I received critical feedback was during my internship at TATICCA, where I built AI pipelines to automate financial statements, working directly with the partner in charge of the data area. A client wanted to send their accounting entries by email in plain language and have them go straight into their books. I designed the first architecture: the emails would go through Google Apps Script into a SQL database, and we'd build the reports from there. When I presented it, the partner told me it was too messy, with too many moving parts. His point was that we didn't need our own database: the AI could turn each email into a JSON already structured like a SPED file, the standard format the Brazilian tax authority uses for digital bookkeeping, and the statements could come straight from that. At first, I was attached to my architecture, because I had already thought out every aspect of it, but I asked him to walk me through it and saw he was right. So I rebuilt it his way, and it became much simpler, easier to build, and with fewer things that could break. What I took from it is to look for the standard that already exists before building something custom. I still do that: when I built the cattle-counting MVP, I started from a pre-labeled dataset instead of labeling everything myself.
"A time you disagreed with someone you worked with."
A time I disagreed with someone I worked with was at BPM Watches. We sold a TAG Heuer that had gone through our full authentication process, and two months later the buyer told us it was fake. We refunded him right away and got the watch back. Our watchmaker couldn't tell it was fake, and it took the authorized TAG Heuer service about two to three months to confirm it. Meanwhile, my business partner wanted to post publicly on our Instagram about what happened. I disagreed: in a market full of fakes, admitting our authentication had failed felt like it could destroy the trust we had built. But instead of just saying no, I suggested we do it his way with one safeguard: first we'd show our whole authentication process, step by step, and then explain what happened and how we handled it. It worked: we got great feedback from clients and even from other watch shops. What I learned is that even when my plan feels safer, the other person may be seeing the bigger picture: in this case, being transparent built more trust than staying quiet.

Two BPM stories (We Commit and disagreement). If both come up, that's fine, they're different situations. Just don't open both with the same setup sentence.

Other behavioral questions

Drafts built from what's true about you. Practice them out loud and adjust the brackets.

"What's your biggest weakness?"
I tend to give too much context before getting to the point. I noticed it while preparing for this process: my first practice answers spent too long on the background. What I've been doing is answering first and adding context only if it's needed, and practicing that out loud. It's improving, but it's something I keep an eye on, especially in English.

Real, specific, already being fixed. Never a disguised strength like "I'm a perfectionist".

"Tell me about a mistake or a failure."
A mistake I learned a lot from was launching our WhatsApp AI agents to real customers too early. The bots were taking real orders for a restaurant, and we hadn't tested enough how the AI handled critical data like [order items, addresses]. Some orders came out wrong, and the client had to deal with complaints. I took responsibility with the client and [what you did: added a human check, fixed the prompts, compensated]. Later, it was part of why we stopped the product. What I learned is to test with a small group before going live with anything that touches a customer's order or money, which is exactly how I'd want to work in Operations.

Fill the brackets with what really happened. If you use this, don't also tell the We Adapt story the same way: one is about the mistake, the other about the decision to change.

"What are you most proud of?"
Probably my start at TATICCA. It was a data engineering internship, and when I joined I didn't know Python or SQL, and barely knew Excel. In the first six months, I learned the SPED tax files from their 300-page manual and wrote code to break those files into tables, fix the errors and rebuild them. By the end of my year and a half there, I was building AI pipelines that automated work people used to do by hand in spreadsheets, [result: hours saved, number of clients]. I'm proud of it because it showed me I can learn almost anything fast if I go deep enough.
"Tell me about a time you had to handle several priorities under pressure."
[Situation: e.g., the weeks of this selection process, with the take home due in a week while finishing my last semester, my thesis and the work for the trade company.] I listed everything with its deadline and its impact, and did the things only I could do first: [example]. Anything others could do, I handed over or pushed back, [example]. The result was [what you delivered on time]. What I learned is that under pressure, the most useful question is what only I can do, and what can wait.

Use a real period you remember well. Keep the numbers concrete.

"Have you worked with people from other countries or cultures?"
Yes, with my partners in the trade company in Spain, in the Basque Country. We worked across time zones and mixed languages, and I was responsible for the company's digital presence, [what you built: website, brand, social media]. What I learned is to write things down clearly, keep the others updated without waiting for a meeting, and use the hours we overlap for decisions, not updates. That's why the daily contact with other Garena markets is something I'm looking forward to.
"Where do you see yourself in five years?"
In five years, I'd like to be a specialist in game monetization and live operations, leading part of the revenue work, ideally with experience across more than one market, since Sea operates in so many countries. I'd like to grow here, because the learning curve of working with millions of players is something I can't find anywhere else.
"How do you handle feedback?" / "How do you like to be managed?"
I like direct feedback, and I try to ask for it early, before something is finished, because it's cheaper to change then. My best example is my internship, when the partner told me my architecture was too messy: it was hard to hear, but I asked him to walk me through his idea and it made the project much simpler. So the manager I work best with is one who tells me clearly what's wrong and lets me own the fix.
"What motivates you?"
Seeing a decision turn into a result I can measure. That's what I liked most in every project: setting a price and seeing whether it sold, building a pipeline and seeing the hours it saved. In a game like Free Fire, that loop is huge and fast, and that's what excites me about this role.

Talking about Free Fire

Thiago asked you to be ready to discuss your own experiences and insights. This only works with real play. Fill this section after playing.

Structure for any game question: what I noticed, why it matters for the player or for revenue, and what I'd try as Operations.

"What's your rank?"
I'm around Silver in ranked so far: I came back to Free Fire during this process. Most of my battle royale hours are on PC, with almost 300 hours of PUBG and around 800 of Fortnite, so the genre is very familiar. What I've been doing in Free Fire is going through the store, the pass and the events to understand how the game makes money and keeps players coming back.
"Which game have you spent the most money on? What does it do well?"
Fortnite, by far. What it does really well is make spending feel safe and social. Skins are purely cosmetic, so nobody feels they're paying to win. The battle pass pays you back some of the currency if you play it, so finishing it feels like a reward and pulls you into the next one. The item shop rotates, so there's always a reason to check it. And the collabs make skins a way to show who you are to your friends. [Add: the one thing you bought and why.]

Natural bridge to Free Fire: the difference is that Free Fire skins carry small attributes, so balance and fairness matter more. Say only what you've checked in the game.

"How does Free Fire compare to PUBG or Fortnite?"
[Fill after playing: one thing Free Fire does better, for example shorter matches that fit a phone, or running well on basic devices; and one thing you'd bring from Fortnite or PUBG, with why.]

Likely questions: "What are you playing these days?", "What do you think of the current event?", "If you could change one thing in Free Fire, what would it be?"

Salary

Thiago said salary is discussed in the last stage. You already told him around R$9,000 to R$10,000 and that you're flexible. Stay consistent.

Based on what similar trainee programs pay, I'd expect something around R$9,000 to R$10,000, but I'm flexible. What matters most to me is the opportunity and what I'll learn here, so I'm open to hearing the full package.

Don't negotiate in the room. If they make an offer, thank them and ask for it in writing.

If they bring up earlier stages

"Tell us about your take home."
My core idea was not relying on paid randomness to make revenue. Since March, the ECA Digital bans loot boxes in any game minors are likely to play, and a free mobile shooter will always have minors. So I sold skins through three channels: a season pass, direct sales, and a Forge, where the ultra rare is split into 30 steps with the full price shown from day one, and some steps are earned by playing. That generated around R$3.9 million per patch for every million monthly players, and an adults-only gacha would have added only 3 to 7%.
"How did the last interview go for you?"
I really enjoyed it. They went deep into my take home, especially the Forge and the event discounts, and I liked defending the logic. I also learned something: I asked about the difference between Asian and Brazilian players, and they explained it's really country by country. That made me curious about how each market is managed.

Garena facts

Your questions at the end

Pick 2 or 3. Senior managers think about the team and the long term, so ask about that. The best question still grows out of something they say.

What separates the trainees who do really well here in their first year?
What's the biggest challenge for the revenue team in Brazil in 2027?
How does the trainee program work in practice: do trainees rotate across areas, or go deep in one?
What do you enjoy most about working at Garena?

Backup

Thiago mentioned AI projects here need to show results. Is there a problem in operations you'd most like to see AI solve?
How has the ECA Digital changed the way the team plans events and offers?

No benefits or work model: HR already covered those.

Emergency phrases

That's a good question, let me think about it for a second.
Let me give you a concrete example.
Could you repeat the question? I want to make sure I answer what you asked.

Thinking in silence for a few seconds reads as maturity. Nerves are normal and expected: they already liked you enough to bring you to the final stage.

Exploring Free Fire tomorrow

You already know the battle royale genre and how skins sell. Tomorrow isn't about playing better: it's about going through every menu with an Operations eye. For each stop, write three lines: what I noticed, why it matters for the player or for revenue, and what I'd test.

Order of the day: about 20 minutes of matches to feel the game again, then at least 40 minutes clicking through every button, as Thiago told you. Take screenshots of prices and offers.

Route through the app

  1. Store. How is it organized? What's featured at the top? How many offers are there at once, and how long do they last? Is anything clearly built for first-time buyers?
  2. Diamond top-up. The pack ladder and prices in reais, first top-up bonuses, which payment methods appear. Then check the external top-up website: are the bonuses or payment methods different from the in-game store?
  3. Booyah Pass. Price, what the free track gives versus the premium one, what you get at level 1 versus the last level, how fast you level up, and whether there's an upgraded version.
  4. Events tab. How many events are running, which are free missions and which cost money, and whether any is a progression event with paid steps. If there is one, how clearly is the total cost shown? (Your take home was about exactly this.)
  5. Roulettes and luck-based items. What still exists after the ECA Digital, what can you see before spending, and is anything blocked or asking for age verification.
  6. Age verification and parental controls. Look in the account settings: how does the game handle age, consent and spending limits today?
  7. Weapon skins. How the attributes are shown, the plus and the minus of each. Compare with Fortnite, where skins are only cosmetic.
  8. Daily rewards and missions. Login rewards, daily and weekly missions: what keeps a player coming back every day?
  9. Current collab or campaign. What's live right now, what it sells, and how it appears in the store and in matches.
  10. Social. Guilds, squads, friends, emotes, and anything tied to creators or influencers.
  11. Modes. Battle Royale, Clash Squad, ranked, event modes: how long a match takes and which one you'd play on a bus.
  12. Notifications and mail. Which offers the game pushes to you, and how often.

Write down at the end