In a stellar start to the final placement season, renowned quantitative trading firms and global investment managers, including Quantbox Research, Quadeye, Maverick Derivatives, Optiver, Da Vinci, Graviton Research Capital, and Squarepoint Capital, have extended lucrative crore-plus offers to secure top engineering talent from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The final placements commenced on Friday, marking a competitive recruitment landscape for the brightest minds in the field.
According to a report of ET, The top offer breached the Rs 2 crore mark at the time of filing this report. US software company Databricks made an offer of about Rs 2.05 crore at IIT Roorkee for an international role. Bulk of the compensation will comprise restricted stock units, said a placement official.
NK Securities, specializing in high-frequency trading and technology, took the lead as the highest-paying employer at specific IITs, notably IIT-BHU, offering an impressive package of Rs 1.68 crore. On the initial day of placements spanning multiple campuses such as Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Madras, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Guwahati, and Varanasi, a diverse array of companies participated. Notable names among them were Accenture Japan, Airbus, Qualcomm, Barclays, Google, Worldquant, Honda R&D, Microsoft, Apple, Navi, Mastercard, Texas Instruments, Flipkart, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Goldman Sachs, NEC, Ola, Sprinklr, Nvidia, Intel, and Indus Insights.
A spokesperson for Optiver said it had made a dozen full-time offers to IIT 2024 graduates for traders, quantitative researchers and software engineer positions. As a tech-driven trading firm, Optiver looks for candidates with STEM backgrounds, and we have been very impressed with the engineering and computer science talent coming from IITs," the spokesperson said in response to an email query. The firm declined to comment on compensation.
Despite apprehensions about the potential influence of the global economic slowdown on this year's placements, which is considered to be one of the most challenging, students on the first day secured salaries spanning from ₹15 lakh to over Rs 2 crore. Indus Insights, for instance, hired students for data science roles with a package of Rs 18 lakh. A significant number of companies presented packages surpassing Rs 30 lakh, with notable names including Microsoft, Apple, Flipkart, Google, and Zomato, as reported by placement cells. Domestic salaries at the upper echelon have surged to the range of Rs 90 lakh to Rs 1.3 crore.