A little background about me: Backend engineer with 2+ years of experience at a mid-sized company
The interviews:
I recently gave an interview for an SDE II role at Amazon but got SDE I. The recruiter said that my system design round did not go well and I did not raise the bar. Apart from that I feel that interviewiers were not satisified with my work experience because I did not work on Amazon's scale of things. They were saying that they handle thousands of transactions per second and I have worked with only 20-30 transactions per second.
My feelings:
I see a lot of people with similar amount of work experience as mine have cracked SDE2 interviews and are getting double compensation than me. Seeing this I feel like rejecting the SDE1 offer and trying for SDE2 after a few months of preparation. But on the other hand I feel maybe my work experience itself is not good enough for SDE2 and I should just accept the offer and try to get promoted internally.
I got 20.5 LPA as base, 9.5+7 LPA as signon bonus and 20 lakhs worth of stock. I know that this is really good for someone with my work experience but according to the current job market I feel I could do better.
What should I do?