An Amazon recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and even though I wasn't actively looking for new opportunities I figured I'd do the Amazon interview to gauge where my interview skill levels are at.

1. Phone Call (30 min)
   This was just a quick call to go over the role and my skill set with the recruiter. It was very informal.
2. Online Assessment(105 min)
   The next step was the OA. I believe these are pretty standardized but it was an easy and medium LC. For each question there was a follow up that asked you to describe your thought process and the complexity of your solution. Due to the NDA I won't share the questions but both questions were fairly straight forward. Since this was my first time solving problems while being timed I struggled a little here but still managed to get optimal solutions that passed all of the test cases just before the time ran out. I just barely had enough time to explain my thought process and the complexity for each of the solutions but I thought since I rushed that section that I might not pass. Two days later, the recruiter emailed me to let me know that I passed and the next step was the virtual onsite.
3. Virtual Onsite
   The onsite consisted of 4 one hour interviews over the course of two days. The format for these is pretty standard but each interview spent about 30 minutes on the technical portion and 30 minutes on the leadership principle questions. Three of the interviews were DSA questions for the technical portion and one interview was system design. Just to reiterate this, make sure you've prepared for the LP questions prior to the interview. I know most people want to devote as much prep time as possible to practicing DSA/system design but if you're not prepared for the LP section it will be very difficult to impress them and this is definitely a big factor in the overall decision.

The main reason I'm making this post is because during the interviews I noticed something a little odd and I wanted to see if anyone else on here has had a similar experience. All of my DSA questions were a little too easy. I'm not saying this in an attempt to brag or anything, I just literally mean that each of the DSA questions I got asked were LC easy's(I confirmed this) and I was able to provide optimal solutions for them with no issue at all. On top of this, when I did solve the questions, the follow ups were all easy as well and I also answered all of them. Each DSA interview ended with the interviewer seeming very satisfied with my solutions. The system design was also on the easier side but after the interviews the only thing I didn't feel super proud of was some of my LP answers and my system design solution(they were pretty good but not spectacular like the DSA portions). At the end of everything though, I felt like I would receive an offer, especially since my bar raiser interview went very well.

Two days later however, I got an email saying they would not be making an offer and they told me to reapply in a year. So my question is has anyone had a similar experience? Do some teams at Amazon just focus entirely on system design and LP and since I didn't do perfect in these areas I failed? The entire experience almost made me feel like they had written me off before I had even started the virtual onsite but I can't figure out why that would have happened. I have never interviewed at Amazon before this and I don't have any sort of dark past that might have caused me to be blacklisted. I'll also add that my experience aligned pretty closely with the team I was interviewing with and Amazon hires lots of people that work at my current company. Any insight or information here would be much appreciated.