MUMBAI: First-time recruiter Visa Inc could be a game changer at the Indian Institutes of Technology this placement season as it battles with Google and Facebook to hire the top graduates for local and global positions.The world’s largest payments network hopes to attract students by dangling a salary of $140,000 plus a relocation bonus for international roles and Rs 22 lakh for domestic hires. The US company confirmed that it will hire 100-120 students from eight IITs, including IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras. Last year’s largest recruiters were Samsung with 271 offers, Reliance Industries with 177 offers, Oracle 135 offers and Flipkart, which surprised all with 118.“We are more than a card company. We will provide technologybased roles and since we have just set shop in India, our work culture will be similar to start-ups. They (students to be hired this year) will be the first ones and will get lots of opportunities,” said Nitin Chandel, senior vice president of Visa’s Developer Platform based in India.The firm will fly in interviewers from its US and Singapore offices. IT major Infosys has helped Visa with the logistics and introduced the company to the IITs, confirmed Chandel.Placements at IITs start from December 1 and Visa has bagged the top slots, which means the company will fight it out with veterans such as Google, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, Samsung and Microsoft for the best candidates. International students will get relocation benefits in addition to their salaries, while domestic placements will be based in Bangalore.During recruitments at topranked engineering colleges outside the IITs, which started in August, placement teams said Google offered $235,000 (Rs 1.44 crore), Microsoft Rs 79.51 lakh for jobs at its Redmond headquarters, Epic Systems $108,300 (Rs 66.4 lakh) and Schlumberger $105,000 (Rs 64.4 lakh). Goldman Sachs recruited for Rs 11 lakh and gave Rs 35 lakh to those who made it to its investment division. Amazon offeredRs 18 lakh and Flipkart about Rs 15 lakh. Visa’s competitors will probably offer similar salaries at IITs, stretching them only in exceptional cases.A placement team member at IIT Kanpur said Visa is looking to fill 11 job profiles, including software engineers, data platform software engineers, information product engineers, networking engineers, data science engineers, infrastructure architects, systems engineers and network provisioning analysts. About 180 students from the college have applied for jobs with Visa.“Although we have just started our hiring plans, we need employees in large numbers,” said Chandel. This is because the payments network announced in early November that it will set up a technology centre in Bengaluru, its first in India