What Skills Actually Get You Hired as a Software Engineer in India Right Now

Every few months someone publishes a "Top 10 Skills for Software Engineers" list that looks like it was written by ChatGPT and reviewed by no one. Python, JavaScript, AWS, communication skills — great, very helpful, thanks.

So I want to do something different here. Instead of a generic list, let me tell you what I actually see in job descriptions across Indian companies right now, broken down honestly by what's truly required vs what's nice to have vs what's genuinely emerging.

The non-negotiables

JavaScript and TypeScript together. Not either/or anymore — both. If your resume only says "JavaScript" and you haven't touched TypeScript, that's a gap worth closing. Almost every product company running a Node.js or React stack has migrated to TypeScript or is mid-migration. It's not hard to learn, and not having it is becoming a visible gap.

SQL. I know, boring. But it comes up in screening calls constantly. Even frontend roles at Indian startups will ask basic SQL in interviews because the assumption is that engineers touch the database directly sometimes. Know your JOINs, know indexes, know how to write a halfway decent query.

Git, obviously. But not just "I use Git" — be comfortable with branching strategies, rebasing, resolving merge conflicts. These come up in technical rounds more than people expect.

The stuff that separates mid-level from senior

System design. In India, this has become the main filter for anyone with 3+ years of experience. Companies like CRED, Razorpay, PhonePe, Groww — they care less about whether you can reverse a linked list and more about whether you can design a payment processing system that handles 10,000 TPS. If you haven't started studying system design, start now. The Grokking the System Design Interview course is overpriced but actually decent. The free resources on YouTube from Gaurav Sen are excellent and free.

AWS fluency — not certification, fluency. Meaning: you've deployed things, you've broken things, you've debugged things in production. The certifications look okay on a resume but interviewers see through them quickly. Actual hands-on experience with EC2, S3, Lambda, and at least one managed database is more valuable than any badge.

Docker. This is table stakes now even for backend engineers. If you're writing code that other people have to run, you should know how to containerize it. Kubernetes is a bonus at the mid-level, but expected at senior.

What's genuinely changing

LLM integration. A lot of product companies in India are adding AI features to their existing products — not building from scratch, but wiring in OpenAI, Anthropic, or Groq APIs, building RAG pipelines, implementing streaming responses. If you've played around with LangChain or built even a basic chatbot that uses an LLM, put it on your resume. This is the fastest-growing requirement I'm seeing in 2026 JDs.

Next.js specifically (not just React). The full-stack JavaScript model has won at startups. If you know React but haven't built anything with Next.js — server components, API routes, ISR — spend a weekend on it. It's genuinely not hard if you know React, and it shows up constantly.

The honest take

You don't need all of this. No one has all of this. Pick your lane — frontend, backend, full-stack, data, DevOps — and go deep on the 5-6 skills that matter most for that lane. Then make sure your resume actually shows those skills clearly, not buried in dense paragraphs.

Check what skills your resume is actually communicating — it's often different from what you think it's saying.