The first day of final placements at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) saw no dearth of big-ticket salary offers as recruiters vied for the country’s top engineering talent amid a pandemic-induced slowdown.
Still, as the IITs went completely online with their final placements for the first time ever, the number of international offers saw a drop. Cohesity, as first reported by ET, is offering the highest annual package of $200,000 (Rs 1.48 crore) for a US role. At IIT Bombay, trading firm Optiver made an international offer of Rs 157,000 (Rs 1.39 crore).
According to various campus placement cells that ET spoke to, big salaries were offered by the likes of B2B SaaS startup Ally.io with around $140,000 (Rs 1.03 crore) for an international role.
Quantitative trading firm Graviton and proprietary trading firm Quantbox are offering salaries of around Rs 80 lakh, said campus placement members, while global cloud implementation partner MTX Group was paying upwards of Rs 70 lakh, they said.
“MTX really believes in identifying and nurturing young talent across the world,” said chief people officer Ankita Sinha. “We have collaborated with IIT Delhi, Bombay, Madras, , Kanpur, Roorkee, Kharagpur, Guwahati and plan to hire approximately 45-50 students across various job roles/technologies.”
Mano Kurien, head of business development at Graviton Research Capital, said in an email: “The salary is in the ballpark. Our offer could be higher than that figure.”
Proprietary trading firm Quadeye’s package was upwards of Rs 58 lakh, said placement team members. Qualcomm offered Rs 46.41 lakh at IIT Bombay while WorldQuant offered Rs 39.7 lakh, both for domestic roles, the institute said.
Ally.io, Quadeye and Quantbox did not respond to queries.
Despite the overall economic environment expected to take a toll on hiring numbers per company this placement season, the first day saw a number of offers being made. IIT Madras said it saw a record 123 in the first session of Day 1, compared with 102 in the year-earlier period. At IIT Roorkee, the highest domestic offer was Rs 80 lakh, a 33% jump over Rs 60 lakh, which was last year’s maximum.
Microsoft was among the top recruiters in terms of number of offers. Other prominent recruiters across campuses on Day 1 included Amazon, Flipkart, Qualcomm India, Sprinklr, Texas Instruments, Uber, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, SAP Labs and Bajaj Auto.