Infosys added more than 4,000 college graduates to its workforce in the June 2026 quarter even as its overall headcount shrank marginally, with the company also flagging plans to expand its pool of engineers who will be embedded directly with client teams. CEO Salil Parikh confirmed salary hikes will be rolled out later this year.
Campus hiring and headcount movement
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said the company had recruited over 4,000 college graduates during the quarter and is on track to hire 20,000 freshers through the year. “We are recruiting, and plan to recruit 20,000 college graduates this year,” Parekh said.
“We have already recruited over 4,000 college graduates this quarter. Token cost will be an important factor in the future. On GCCs, our traction is looking strong. In GCCs, there’s always a cycle,” he added, referring to global capability centres set up by multinational firms in India. To give a comparison, TCS hired over 9200 employees in Q1FY27.
Despite the fresh hiring, Infosys had a total workforce of 328,062 employees as of June 30, 2026, against 328,594 employees at the end of March 2026, a net reduction of 532 employees during the quarter. On a year-on-year basis, the company’s headcount rose by 4,274 from 323,788 employees in June 2025.
The number of software professionals stood at 310,039 as of June 30, 2026, compared with 310,887 in the previous quarter and 306,706 a year earlier. Employees in sales and support functions numbered 18,023, up from 17,707 in the March quarter and 17,082 in the year-ago period. The share of women employees rose to 39.6%, from 39.5% in the previous quarter and 39.1% a year earlier.
Infosys attrition trends
Voluntary attrition at the country’s second-largest IT services company stood at 13% on a trailing 12-month basis in the quarter ended June 2026 (Q1 FY27), down from 14.4% in the same quarter last year. The metric, however, rose from 12.6% recorded in the March 2026 quarter.
Infosys salary hikes
Parekh said salary hikes would be rolled out in two phases, in October and January. “We will roll out salary hikes in October and January in three parts. Most employees will get hikes in October, while senior employees will get them in January,” he said, adding that the company’s “AI mandate is well put” and that CEO-designate Ashiss Kumar Dash has been closely involved in it.
Push on forward-deployed engineers
Parekh said Infosys plans to build a team of 6,000 frontier engineers, or forward-deployed engineers, over the next few years. “Our clients are able to work with any foundational model. We continue to see the macro environment remaining uncertain,” he said.
As per an earlier Financial Express report, the forward-deployed engineer model, popularised by Palantir and since adopted by companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, involves embedding engineers directly with client teams to redesign workflows and integrate AI into business processes, rather than handing implementation over to partners after a software sale.
Rival Tata Consultancy Services has signalled a similar push. TCS chief executive K Krithivasan had said that the company plans to build a forward-deployed engineer organisation equivalent to roughly 1-1.5% of its workforce. TCS has already built an annualised AI services business worth $2.6 billion, with its next phase of growth expected to depend on helping clients scale AI pilots into enterprise-wide deployments.