Disclaimer work at Amazon.

Do you mind expanding on this a little bit on what position you were applying for?

I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II level already, or applying for that role with that amount of experience.

Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of experience but are applying for internships.

Although I doubt that's your specific case...

I'd be very surprised and extremely skeptical we have year caps on senior roles like SDE3/Principal