Java interviews by company type
The same five years of experience gets you a materially different interview at an IT services firm, a product company, and a global capability centre. The weighting changes, the round structure changes, and the reason you get rejected changes.
Service-based
IT services, consultancies, system integrators
TCS · Infosys · Wipro · Accenture · Cognizant · …
Breadth over depth, and predictability over surprise. The interviewer is often staffing a specific client project, so they are checking that you can be billed on it without supervision.
4 rounds · 23 questions
What this interview looks like →Product-based
product companies, consumer tech, big tech
Amazon · Google · Microsoft · Flipkart · Swiggy · …
Data structures and algorithms first, and often decisively. The interview is calibrated to a hiring bar rather than to a project vacancy, so the questions are unfamiliar by design and the interviewer is watching how you approach a problem you have not seen.
6 rounds · 20 questions
What this interview looks like →GCC / captive centres
global capability centres, GICs, offshore development centres
Walmart Global Tech · Target · Goldman Sachs · JPMorgan Chase · Optum · …
The in-house engineering arm of a foreign parent, building that company's own products rather than client deliverables. The interview sits between the other two and is often the most balanced of the three: real DSA but rarely leetcode-hard, genuine Java and framework depth, and design discussion grounded in the domain.
5 rounds · 21 questions
What this interview looks like →
What each one weights
Relative emphasis out of five. This is the whole reason the same candidate performs differently at two companies on the same day.
| Area | Service-based | Product-based | GCC / captive centres |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Java breadth | — | — | |
| Project explanation | — | — | |
| Spring Boot basics | — | — | |
| SQL and joins | — | — | |
| Coding / DSA | — | — | |
| System design | |||
| DSA | — | ||
| Problem-solving communication | — | — | |
| Low-level design / machine coding | — | — | |
| Java depth | — | — | |
| Behavioural | — | — | |
| Java and framework depth | — | — | |
| Low-level design and code quality | — | — | |
| Domain understanding | — | — | |
| Testing | — | — |
Read this as a guide, not a prediction. These are patterns across many interviews, not a guarantee about any one company. Process varies by company, by team, by hiring manager and by year, and a single company can run all three shapes for different roles. Use this to decide where to spend preparation time, not to predict a specific loop.