Infosys Interview Questions for Freshers 2026: System Engineer, Specialist and Power Programmer

This page is for 2025 and 2026 batch engineering and MCA students preparing for Infosys fresher hiring: InfyTQ or an off-campus online test, then the technical and HR interviews for the System Engineer, Specialist Programmer or Power Programmer roles. It explains the tracks, what the interviews actually ask, and gives 25 questions with model answers. If you have a managerial-style round scheduled, the Infosys managerial round page has thirty more.

Infosys interviews are shorter and friendlier than most freshers expect. That is the trap: candidates relax, talk loosely about their project, say something careless about relocation, and get a rejection mail a week later.

How the Infosys process works in 2026

As of September 2026, Infosys's graduate careers page describes InfyTQ as its learning and certification platform and HackWithInfy as its coding competition; it does not publish round-by-round details or CTC. The following comes from the official pages plus placement-site reporting from 2026.

The three tracks.

Infosys does not publish these figures; they are candidate reports collected by placement sites (Ophy AI, FACE Prep, PapersAdda, Entri). Numbers vary by college tier and cycle.

InfyTQ. Access is by invitation through your placement cell or an Infosys email tied to a drive. The certification round runs three hours: two hands-on coding problems, ten programming MCQs and ten DBMS MCQs, in Java or Python chosen at slot booking, with no negative marking. Score 65% or above and you become an Infosys Certified Software Programmer and choose between the Advantage Round (three more programming questions in three hours, used for Specialist consideration) or a direct System Engineer interview.

Off-campus online test. For SE drives, roughly 2.5 to 3 hours covering quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning, verbal ability, pseudocode and one or two easy coding problems. Specialist and Power Programmer tests are coding-heavy: arrays, strings, dynamic programming, graphs and trees.

HackWithInfy. As of 2026 it is open to engineering students graduating in 2027: a virtual code-rush round, a face-to-face coding round, and a grand finale with pre-placement interview opportunities for Power Programmer and Specialist roles.

Interviews. For SE, a technical interview of 30 to 45 minutes (OOP, one language, DBMS, your project, internship) and an HR conversation of 15 to 20 minutes, frequently merged into a single techno-behavioural interview. Placement sites describe the HR conversation as doubling as the managerial round for freshers; a separate managerial round is more common for experienced hires and some Specialist panels.

Eligibility. Most drives ask for 60% or 6.0 CGPA in Class 10, Class 12 and graduation, no active backlogs and a limited education gap, but Infosys sets criteria per drive; read the drive notice.

After the offer. Freshers train at the Mysuru campus before allocation, so relocation is asked in every HR conversation. Infosys has historically required a service agreement; the amount and duration are in the offer letter.

What Infosys interviewers are testing

• Fundamentals in one language, usually the one you named in InfyTQ. Expect OOP, exceptions, collections, and a short program.
• DBMS with SQL. Infosys panels lean on joins, keys and normalisation more than most.
• Your project, in depth. Architecture, your exact contribution, one bug, one thing you would change.
• Learning attitude. Infosys assigns technology by business need after training; panels listen for "I can learn anything" backed by evidence.
• Commitment signals. Relocation to Mysuru and then anywhere, shifts, the service agreement, other offers, higher-studies plans.

25 Infosys interview questions with model answers

Technical: programming

1. Tell me about your final-year project.

Ninety seconds: problem, your part, stack, one number. "I built an attendance system using face recognition for our department. My part was the Python backend with OpenCV and a Flask API; a teammate did the React front end. The hard part was false positives in low light, which I reduced by adding a confidence threshold and a manual override. In a two-week pilot with 60 students accuracy was about 94% and the professor stopped taking roll call." Then stop. The project explanation guide has the full script.

2. Explain OOP concepts using your project.

"Encapsulation: my Student class keeps the face embedding private and exposes a matches() method. Abstraction: the API layer calls a Recognizer interface without knowing whether it is OpenCV or a cloud model. Inheritance: CameraSource and VideoFileSource both extend FrameSource. Polymorphism: each source overrides nextFrame() and the pipeline does not care which one it is."

3. What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface in Java?

"An abstract class can have state and concrete methods and is extended by one class; an interface defines a contract, has no instance state, and a class can implement many. Since Java 8 interfaces can have default methods, so the practical rule is: use an abstract class when subclasses share code and state, an interface when unrelated classes must satisfy the same contract."

4. What is exception handling? Difference between throw and throws?

"try, catch and finally handle abnormal conditions without crashing the program. throw raises an exception object inside a method; throws in the signature declares that the method may pass a checked exception to its caller. I catch specific exceptions, log them with context, and never swallow them silently."

5. Write a program to count vowels and consonants in a string.

Talk first. "Loop through each character, lower-case it, check if it is a letter, then if it is in the set a, e, i, o, u count as vowel, else consonant. Skip spaces and digits. O(n) time. I would ask whether 'y' counts." Then write it in Java or Python and dry-run it on 'Infosys'.

6. What is the difference between == and .equals() in Java?

"== compares references, so two different String objects with the same text are not == unless interned. .equals() compares content when the class overrides it, which String does. In my project a login bug came from comparing user IDs with ==; switching to .equals() fixed it."

7. What is a lambda expression? Where did you use one?

"A short anonymous function, mainly used with functional interfaces and streams. In my project I sorted students by last-seen time with students.sort((a, b) -> b.lastSeen.compareTo(a.lastSeen)) instead of writing a Comparator class." One real use beats a definition.

8. Explain time complexity of binary search and when it applies.

"O(log n) because each step halves the search space. It needs a sorted array with random access; on a linked list it degrades because reaching the middle is O(n). I would also mention the overflow-safe midpoint: low plus (high minus low) divided by two."

Technical: DBMS and SQL

9. What is the difference between primary key and unique key?

"Both enforce uniqueness. A primary key cannot be null and there is one per table; a unique key allows a null in most databases and a table can have many. In my attendance schema Student.id was the primary key and Student.roll_number a unique key."

10. Write a query to find employees earning more than their department's average.

"SELECT e.name FROM employee e JOIN (SELECT dept_id, AVG(salary) AS avg_sal FROM employee GROUP BY dept_id) d ON e.dept_id = d.dept_id WHERE e.salary > d.avg_sal. A correlated subquery works too, but the derived table is easier to read and usually faster."

11. Explain normalisation up to 3NF with a college example.

"1NF: atomic values, one row per student-course rather than a comma-separated list. 2NF: every non-key column depends on the whole key, so course name should not live in a student-course table. 3NF: no transitive dependency, so a professor's department goes in a Professor table, not in Course. I denormalise only for reporting tables."

12. What are ACID properties?

"Atomicity: all or nothing. Consistency: the database moves between valid states. Isolation: concurrent transactions do not see each other's partial work. Durability: committed data survives a crash. A fee payment that debits a wallet and creates a receipt must be atomic; if the receipt insert fails the debit must roll back."

13. Difference between WHERE and HAVING?

"WHERE filters rows before grouping; HAVING filters groups after aggregation. To find departments with more than ten employees earning above 50,000: WHERE salary > 50000 GROUP BY dept HAVING COUNT(*) > 10."

Technical: OS, networks and general

14. What is a deadlock and how do you prevent it?

"Two or more processes waiting on each other's resources forever. It needs mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no pre-emption and circular wait. Prevention breaks one condition; the practical fix is acquiring locks in a fixed global order, or using timeouts."

15. What is the difference between TCP and UDP?

"TCP is connection-oriented, ordered and reliable with retransmission; UDP is connectionless and faster with no delivery guarantee. HTTP, email and file transfer use TCP; video calls, DNS and gaming use UDP where a lost packet is better than a late one."

16. What is cloud computing and what are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS?

"Using computing resources over the internet on demand. IaaS is raw infrastructure like a virtual machine; PaaS is a managed platform like a hosted database; SaaS is a complete application like Gmail. Infosys Cobalt is the company's cloud offering, and most client projects involve some migration, so I have started with AWS basics."

Situational and managerial-style questions

17. Your teammate is not contributing to the project. What do you do?

STAR. "In our four-person project one member went quiet for two weeks. I spoke to him privately; he had a family emergency. We moved him to testing and documentation he could do remotely and I picked up his module. We submitted on time. If someone simply refuses to work, I document and escalate, but I always start with a conversation."

18. You are put on a technology you have never used. How do you approach it?

"The same way I learned OpenCV for my project: official documentation first, one small end-to-end example, then the actual task. I would ask my lead for the project's coding standards and a buddy for the first week. Infosys assigns stacks by need, and I chose Infosys knowing that."

19. Tell me about a time you failed.

"In second year I led a hackathon team and we did not finish because I kept adding features. We had no demo at all. Since then I write the minimum demo scope first and do not touch extras until it works. My final-year project was scoped that way and shipped a pilot."

HR round

20. Tell me about yourself.

Name, place, degree and college with CGPA, one project, one skill, why Infosys, in under ninety seconds. Full guide: tell me about yourself.

21. Why Infosys over other IT companies?

"Three specific reasons. The Mysuru training is the most structured fresher programme in Indian IT and I want that base. Infosys has clear internal tracks, SE to Specialist to Power Programmer, so I can grow without leaving. And I have used InfyTQ for a year, so I already know how Infosys teaches." Add a personal reason if you have one.

22. Are you willing to relocate to Mysuru for training and to any location after that? Rotational shifts?

"Yes to both. I know training is at Mysuru and allocation depends on the project; I have discussed this with my family." Placement sites are blunt about this: saying no to relocation at Infosys usually means rejection.

23. Do you have other offers, or plans for higher studies?

Facts only. "I have a TCS Ninja offer; I would choose Infosys for the Specialist path. No higher-studies plans in the next three years." Do not lie about offers; Infosys checks joining behaviour across batches.

24. Why should we hire you?

"My project is deployed and I can defend every line of it. My fundamentals in Java and SQL are solid, as my InfyTQ score shows. And I do not need to be pushed to learn; I taught myself OpenCV for the project." See why should we hire you.

25. Do you have any questions for us?

"What does the first project allocation usually look like after Mysuru training?" and "How does the path from System Engineer to Specialist Programmer work?" Two questions, then thank the panel.

Mistakes that get freshers rejected at Infosys

• Saying no to relocation or shifts. The most reported rejection reason.
• A project you cannot defend. Infosys panels go three questions deep on whatever you mention.
• Weak SQL. Many candidates prepare only coding and freeze on a join question.
• Inconsistent answers about backlogs, gaps or offers between the form, the technical panel and HR.
• Talking down the System Engineer role. If you sound like you are waiting for a better offer, the panel assumes you are.
• Rambling introductions. Over two minutes and the panel starts checking the clock.

How to practise the Infosys rounds

Infosys interviews are short, so the difference between selected and rejected is often thirty seconds of clarity on the project and one calm answer on relocation. Both come from timed practice.

In MockMate Practice, attach your resume and paste the Infosys role description or InfyTQ invitation text, pick a technical round and run a ten-minute adaptive session in the browser; the interviewer persona follows up on your project and the technical round includes a code editor for the count-the-vowels type program. Run a second ten-minute HR round for relocation, shifts, offers and the introduction. Each session ends with a report showing every answer, your response timing, recurring weaknesses and a recommended next practice. Eligible accounts get three free Practice starts of up to ten minutes each. Use MockMate Live assistance only in interviews or meetings where the organisation or interviewer permits it; when permission is unclear, which is the case for Infosys selection rounds, stay with Practice.

For the managerial-style questions that Specialist panels and experienced hires get, see the Infosys managerial round. Company-mapped sessions are explained at /mock-interview.