Hire Entry level Java Developers
Java remains the default for large enterprise backends in India, particularly in banking, insurance and services. The hiring signal that matters most is Spring Boot depth combined with an understanding of JVM behaviour under load - heap sizing, garbage collection pauses and thread-pool exhaustion account for most production incidents on this stack.
Skills to screen for
Must have5
- Core Java (collections, concurrency, generics)
- Spring Boot and dependency injection
- JPA / Hibernate and SQL performance
- JUnit and integration testing
- JVM memory model and GC basics
Useful to have4
- Microservices patterns
- Kafka
- Kubernetes deployment
- Reactive Spring (WebFlux)
Experience levels and what to expect
CTC ranges are advertised figures from live listings on betterjobs.in, not survey data. Actual offers vary with location, funding stage and interview performance.
| Level | Experience | Scope | Typical CTC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior | 0-2 years | Implements endpoints and services under close review. | ₹3-7 L |
| Mid-level | 2-5 years | Owns modules including persistence and transaction design. | ₹8-18 L |
| Senior | 5-9 years | Designs service architecture and leads performance work. | ₹20-40 L |
| Lead / Principal | 9+ years | Owns platform architecture and technical governance. | ₹42-75 L |
What this role owns
- Build and maintain Spring Boot services
- Design entity models and tune query performance
- Handle transaction boundaries and concurrency correctly
- Diagnose production issues from heap dumps and thread dumps
What actually separates a good hire here
Ask what an N+1 query is and how they last found one. Anyone who has run Hibernate in production has a specific story. A textbook definition without one usually means their ORM experience is academic.
The common mistake
Filtering on Spring version experience instead of on JVM and SQL fundamentals. Framework versions are learnable in days; diagnosing a GC pause is not.
Questions worth asking in a first screen
- 1A service degrades after two hours under load, then recovers on restart. Where do you look?
- 2When would you not use @Transactional?
- 3How do you size a thread pool for a service calling a slow downstream API?