What Companies Are Hiring For
Real skills from real job descriptions — Naukri, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor — filtered for Java backend developers in India. Organised by experience level so you know exactly what to focus on.
Skills by Experience Level
Based on May 2026 job descriptions on Naukri & LinkedIn India
Campus hires and early-career developers. Service companies hire in bulk; product companies run competitive coding rounds.
Expected CTC
3 – 10 LPA
Who's hiring
TCS · Infosys · Wipro · Cognizant · Capgemini · HCL · Accenture · Persistent · Mphasis · LTIMindtree
Must-have & Important
What they ask in interviews
- •OOP conceptual questions (inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction)
- •Collections internals (HashMap, ArrayList vs LinkedList)
- •SQL joins, subqueries, basic indexing
- •Arrays, strings, and linked list problems on LeetCode
- •Reverse a string / Fibonacci / basic patterns in Java
Hot Skills 2026
Skills with the fastest-growing presence in Indian JDs right now
GitHub Copilot
AI Dev Tools
Expected at 90%+ of product company teams in 2025. Knowing how to use Copilot effectively — not just accepting suggestions blindly — is now a baseline expectation.
Spring AI
Java + AI
Spring's official AI integration framework. Companies building Java products are adding AI features and reaching for Spring AI first. Huge demand at mid/senior level.
LangChain4j
Java + AI
The Java-native LLM framework. RAG pipelines, AI agents, tool calling — all in familiar Java/Spring idioms. Growing fast in fintech and enterprise Java shops.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
AI Architecture
The pattern behind AI features that use your own data. Showing up in senior JDs across all industries — especially fintech, edtech, and enterprise SaaS.
Kubernetes (K8s)
DevOps / Cloud
No longer optional at mid/senior level. Companies migrated to K8s 2–3 years ago and now expect engineers to operate, not just deploy to it.
Prompt Engineering
AI Dev Skills
Writing effective prompts is now a developer skill — for code generation, spec writing, test generation, and documentation. Showing up explicitly in JDs.
Virtual Threads (Java 21)
Java
Java 21 virtual threads are replacing reactive frameworks for I/O-heavy services. Companies on Spring Boot 3.2+ are already migrating. Strong differentiator at mid/senior level.
Apache Kafka
Messaging
The event backbone of every serious product company in India. No longer just for FAANG — Swiggy, Flipkart, Paytm, PhonePe — all use Kafka heavily.
What Companies Are Looking For
Distilled from recent job descriptions and interview reports
Amazon
FAANGHeavy LP (Leadership Principles) round. Every technical answer expected with data/impact.
Flipkart
ProductExtremely strong on system design. Expect "Design Flipkart's order management system."
Razorpay
FintechFintech rigour: data consistency, idempotency, and failure handling are core topics.
TCS Digital
ServiceNational Qualifier Test (NQT) first. Digital stream has a separate higher-bar process.
Swiggy
ProductReal-time systems, geo-spatial queries, and high-throughput design are common topics.
Infosys SP/EP
ServiceInfyTQ platform score matters. SP/EP tracks have competitive programming rounds.
Start preparing for your target level
AiCanCode has curated prep tracks mapped directly to these trending skills — with practice problems, mock interviews, and Aria AI guidance.