I secured an interview opportunity at Infosys by directly applying on their portal for a Java Backend position. I have 3 years of experience.

1st Round - Technical Round (30 mins)
The interviewer covered a wide range of topics, from API creation to core Java concepts. We discussed the difference between throw and throws, interface and abstraction, checked and unchecked exceptions, and polymorphism. I was also asked a question to reverse a string. I successfully cleared this round.

2nd Round - Hiring Manager (30 mins)
This round involved one output-based question. The manager also asked questions based on my resume and SQL. I was selected to move to the next round.

3rd Round - HR Round (15 mins)
In the final round, the HR representative discussed salary expectations, my notice period, and other relevant details.

Currently, my status is undergoing background verification.

I wanted to share my entire journey for the Infosys Specialist Programmer role through HackWithInfy, detailing the assessment to interview process.

Registration

I registered for HackWithInfy through the placement cell at my university.

Online Assessment (OA)

The OA consisted of 3 coding questions. I was able to solve 2 questions completely and partially solve 1. A few weeks later, I received the shortlist email for the interview round.

Round 1 – Problem Solving (Offline Coding)

After about a month, the interview process began. The first round was an offline coding test conducted physically in front of interviewers. We were divided into groups of 5 and given 2 coding problems on the Wingspan portal. The requirement was to solve at least one problem completely. Common topics included Greedy, Knapsack, Dynamic Programming, Trees, Graphs, Segment Trees, and Fenwick Trees. I managed to pass 14 out of 15 test cases (3 sample + 12 hidden).

Round 2 – Basic DSA / CS Concepts

This was a short DSA round to check my basic problem-solving skills. I was asked questions on Climbing Stairs, swapping two numbers without using a third variable, and Merge Sort. I also learned that other candidates were asked variations of Fibonacci, Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS), Longest Common Subsequence (LCS), and other standard DSA problems. Having cleared the OA, I found this round to be straightforward.

Round 3 – HR + Technical Discussion (1:1)

This was a one-on-one interview, mostly focused on my resume and fundamental concepts. The interviewer asked me to rate myself out of 5 on each skill mentioned in my resume. Then, basic questions were asked from OOPs, SQL, and HTML/CSS. This round lasted around 20 minutes and was quite relaxed.

Conclusion

That was the end of my interview process. Overall, the experience was smooth and focused mainly on DSA + basics of CS.

My Infosys Interview Experience for Associate Consultant

I recently had the opportunity to interview for the Associate Consultant role at Infosys in Pune, leveraging my 2.5+ years of IT experience. Here's a detailed breakdown of my interview journey across four distinct rounds:

Round 1: Technical Interview (Virtual)

This round was primarily focused on backend concepts, particularly Java, and practical implementation. The interviewer delved into several key areas:

• Java 8 Stream API: We discussed its various use cases, how to perform filtering, mapping, and grouping operations.
• Microservices & API Gateway: I was asked about common communication patterns in microservices architecture and the advantages of utilizing an API Gateway.
• Spring Boot: The discussion moved to exception handling, specifically differentiating between @ControllerAdvice and @ExceptionHandler.
• Coding Question: I was given a coding challenge to find the K-th frequent element in an array and was expected to provide an optimized solution.

Round 2: Face-to-Face (Bhubaneswar Campus)

This round was a deep dive into my projects. I had to explain in detail:

• The specific features I had delivered in my previous roles.
• My exact contribution to the team for those features.
• The business impact that my delivered features had.

Round 3: Managerial Discussion (Same Day)

The managerial round involved scenario-based and behavioral questions. A notable question was: “How would you handle a conflict within the team?” This round aimed to test my problem-solving mindset, leadership qualities, and my overall consulting approach.

Round 4: HR Discussion (After 2 Hours)

The final round was a straightforward HR discussion, covering standard topics such as:

• Salary expectations.
• Location preference (I reiterated Pune).
• Career growth opportunities and role expectations within Infosys.

Final Verdict:

I am pleased to share that I received an offer for the Associate Consultant role at Infosys in Pune!

I am a 2024 Computer Science and Engineering graduate from a tier 3 private college. I'm proficient in competitive programming, being a Knight on LeetCode (top 3%) and a Specialist on Codeforces, having solved about 2000 problems across various platforms. My development skills include React.js, Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, and I am familiar with AWS.

Infosys typically offers packages around 3.5 LPA to freshers. For the Specialist Programmer role, it provides around 9.5 LPA. My college placement team made a small mistake, initially mentioning the 3.5 LPA role, which led to 1900 students appearing for the drive. However, the job description and pre-placement talk clarified that only the Specialist Programmer role was available.

Online Assessment (OA):

• Question 1: This was the hardest. It involved a segment tree. I usually copy my segment tree class in contests, but copy-pasting was disallowed. I spent half an hour trying to implement it from scratch but couldn't. I then tried brute force and an optimized brute force, but both failed all hidden test cases. I'd rate this around Codeforces 1700-1800 level.
• Question 2: An ad-hoc problem, roughly Codeforces 1600 level. I don't recall the exact question, but it involved a small observation, possibly related to caching the last visited index. I solved it in 30 minutes. By this point, 70% of candidates had already quit.
• Question 3: A straightforward recursion question to explore all possible combinations. There were no repeating sub-problems, so memoization wasn't required. I solved it in 15 minutes. This was comparable to a LeetCode second Medium question during contests.

Out of 1900 students, only 12 were called for the interview.

Interview:

The main challenge was to Design an LFU Cache. I hadn't studied LFU since my second year. The interviewer explained the problem statement and his expectations, then left the room. I thought about the problem, recalling the necessary data structures like LinkedLists and HashMaps. The logic magically started falling into place, and I had the solution. Once the logic was clear, coding it wasn't an issue. I wrote the code and drew a proper, color-coded diagram to explain my solution, which took about 10 minutes. When he returned, he was somewhat surprised by my speed. He reviewed my code, asked a few questions about specific lines, and I clarified everything to his satisfaction.

He then moved to system design. He asked: "Given a list with filters, such as a list of orders for an e-commerce site, how will you optimize when a user wants to filter the list by COD or prepaid?" I explained that with a simple filter, we would have to go through the complete database. For an on-off logic filter like COD/not-COD, I suggested storing separate tables for COD and prepaid orders. He then mentioned this wouldn't work well for write-heavy systems. I tried to come up with a different approach, but after about 2 minutes, he ended the discussion and asked if I had any questions for him. He might have asked other system design questions that I don't distinctly remember.

I received the result after one day. Out of the 12 interviewees, 6 were selected, and I was one of them.

I had the opportunity to participate in HackWithInfy 2022, an all-India coding competition organized by Infosys. My performance in the competition, where I secured an Under 100th Rank, earned me a Pre-Placement Interview opportunity for the Specialist Programmer role at Infosys. This success also qualified me for the Grand Finale, which was held at the Infosys Pune Development Centre from August 25-29, 2022.

HackWithInfy Round 1: Coding Competition

This round featured three problem-solving questions. The first question was relatively easy and could be solved with a brute-force approach, bearing similarities to the coin change problem. The second question was of medium difficulty and revolved around a greedy algorithm. The final question was a hard problem requiring dynamic programming.

HackWithInfy Round 2: Video Interview

This was a 1-hour video interview conducted via Skype. The interviewer began by asking me to introduce myself. During my introduction, I highlighted my strengths in problem-solving, data structures, and algorithms. Based on this, she presented a coding challenge:

Coding Question:

The problem required me to work with two given strings and make them equal by deleting exactly one character from either string in the minimum number of steps. Each step allowed me to delete one character from either string.

This question is available on LeetCode: Delete Operation for Two Strings.

After discussing the coding question, the interview shifted towards theoretical topics:

OOPs Questions:

1. What is Abstraction?
2. Explain Inheritance, its types, specifically Multiple and Multilevel Inheritance.

DBMS Questions:

1. What is Indexing?
2. What are Views?
3. What are ACID properties?
4. What is the difference between WHERE and HAVING clauses?
5. What is a Trigger?

Finally, the interviewer asked some basic questions about the projects I had mentioned on my resume.