How to get hired
"Software developer" in India is four different labour markets wearing the same title. Your offer letter might say Software Engineer at all four, but the work, the interview and the next move are not the same. If you are still a student, read how freshers get software jobs for the campus and mass-hiring tests; this guide is about what comes after you know which door you are walking through.
IT services firms
HCLTech, Wipro, Capgemini, NTT Data, UST, Birlasoft and their peers sell developers to clients by the hour. They hire in bulk, train you on whatever the client needs, and place you on a "project" that may run for years. Interviews for laterals are short and stack-specific: one technical round with a project lead, sometimes a client round, then HR. They rarely ask hard algorithms. They do ask what you personally did on your last project, so be exact about modules, tables and tickets you owned.
The trade-off is the bench. Between projects you may sit unbilled, and the skill you get is the skill the client happened to need.
Global capability centres (GCCs)
Banks, retailers, manufacturers and health companies run their own engineering offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. Citi, Siemens and many others fall in this group. Work is on the parent company's own systems, appraisals follow the parent's cycle, and interviews look like product-company rounds with a domain flavour: a coding round, a design round, and a manager round about how you work with teams in another time zone. Pay bands are usually a step above services for the same experience.
Consulting firms' technology arms
Deloitte, PwC and EY hire developers for implementation projects: ERP integrations, data platforms, client portals. Expect client travel or client-site work, titles like Consultant and Senior Consultant instead of Engineer, and interviews that check how you explain technical choices to a non-technical person.
Product companies and startups
Amazon, Microsoft and Google at one end, funded startups at the other. Interviews lean on data structures, problem solving and, from about three years of experience, system design. Startups add a practical round: build a small feature in a few hours, or walk through code you wrote.
Picking a stack
Employers hire for a stack, not for "coding". Each one has its own page with the frameworks, tests and titles that come with it: Java, Python, JavaScript and TypeScript (frontend), .NET and C#, PHP, C and C++ and mobile. Choose by the employers you want, not by what is trending on social media: banks and insurers still run on Java and .NET, chip and automotive firms on C and C++, agencies and small businesses on PHP.
Moving between the four
The most common jump is services to GCC or product, usually at the two-to-four-year mark. What makes it work is depth in one stack plus one cloud platform, and the ability to talk about a production problem you fixed. Platform end-of-support dates (for example, .NET 8 support ended on 10 November 2026; Java's current long-term release, JDK 25, came out in September 2025) create migration projects every year, and having done one is a strong line on a resume. Services firms often have 60 to 90 day notice periods, which is a real barrier when switching; read notice period negotiation before you resign.
What the work is like
The first year is mostly reading other people's code: fixing bugs, writing small features, getting pull requests reviewed. On client projects you may join calls late in the evening to overlap with US or UK teams. Production support rotations, where you are on call for a week, are common in GCCs and product firms.
The titles run Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Lead or Staff Engineer, then either Engineering Manager or Principal/Architect. Pay moves most at job changes, not at appraisals, which is why so many developers switch every two to three years.