Groupon Cloud Engineer interview experience

Right before the interviews, I asked directly whether the focus would be on engineering principles and my background rather than knowing specific internal tooling, and they confirmed that this was the plan. I went through the interviews and felt good about the outcome, and later I learned I’d seemingly passed.

But the team still rejected me, citing a lack of knowledge and experience with their tools and stack—things like Kubernetes—despite the earlier “nice to have” framing. The strangest part was how the process shifted around: after the wash-up, the manager of a sibling team joined, liked