Connect with us!
Amsterdam
- +31 20 294 70 10
- recruitment@davincitrading.com
- Claude Debussylaan 16, 1082 MD, Amsterdam
Mumbai
- +91 22 4905 5835
- info@salaiderivatives.com
- Level 7, The Capital, Plot No. C- 70, G Block, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra East, Mumbai- 400051, India
Frequently asked questions
Our name is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, a scientist and artist and one of the most brilliant minds in human history. It is a satisfying coincidence that if you take the first phonetic syllable of each of our founders’ names, David, Vidit and Jiteshu, you get ‘Da Vinci’.
Our employees are our most important assets, and we invest heavily in their growth and happiness. Da Vinci creates a workplace that offers challenges and opportunities that are highly rewarding to motivated individuals. The environment is dynamic, and no two days are the same.
We foster an open environment where employees are encouraged to speak honestly about their challenges and bring new ideas to the table. We are non-hierarchical, which means everyone is instrumental to working towards our company goals.
It’s best to hear Da Vinci team members describe their experiences in their own words: discover life at Da Vinci.
We chose Amsterdam as the location for our headquarters because it’s an inspiring place to work with a strong historical connection to trading. The world’s first stock market was established in 1602 in Amsterdam, which is why many trading companies call Amsterdam their home. No other city can compete with Amsterdam’s exciting atmosphere for trading and market engagement.
We currently have 100 Davincians across Amsterdam and Mumbai. As we expand our business and open new offices across the globe we aim to grow our numbers sustainably. Our team benefits from having a mutual respect for each other both professionally and personally. We all know each other and work together closely across desks, departments and functions.
We currently have the luxury of being relatively small and agile. While we are growing, our plans will allow us to remain flexible and connected.
What makes our firm unique is its challenging yet supportive work environment, which prioritises cooperation and respectful collaboration. We nurture innovation and provide access to in-house training and external educational programs.
We offer our expat employees a relocation package and support their settling in the Netherlands. There are lots of company-sponsored activities that will give you a chance to get to know your colleagues outside work and explore the city, including Friday drinks, game evenings, seasonal parties, and company trips.
We offer a 6 weeks summer internship program as well as part-time roles for students located in The Netherlands. Check out our career page and follow us on social media to keep up with the latest Da Vinci news.
Our application process includes three steps: CV submission, assessments, and interviews.
If you apply for a trader position, you will be required to complete a numerical quiz.
If you apply for a quant researcher position, you will be required to complete a numerical quiz as well as a programming challenge.
If you apply for a software engineer position, you will be required to complete a coding challenge.
The numerical quiz consists of mental arithmetics and approximations. When preparing for the quiz, you should know that candidates are only allowed to take the same assessment once. So, we advise you to prepare well and only take the quiz in optimal conditions. Unfortunately, this means that if you fail, you will not be able to re-apply for any role that entails that same assessment. Please note that although we do change the questions periodically, this does not happen very often. As the quiz is also meant to evaluate candidates’ ability to deal with unexpected circumstances, we do not provide extra information about it or example questions. While we do not have a specific source to direct candidates to, any online sources where one can practice fast mental calculations, and approximations could help with preparation.
To help you prepare for the quant researcher programming challenge, we can share some important aspects that we look at:
- Understanding of the trading concept
- Correctness of the implementation
- Cross-verification of the results (possibly intuitively or with data)
- Structure of the code
We expect successful candidates to excel in at least one of these aspects and meet our standards in the others.
To help you prepare for the software engineer coding challenge, we can tell you who we are hoping to find with this test:
- Developers that have in-depth professional experience in the financial industry or relevant work and can quickly get to full speed, independently picking up on day-to-day feature requests by trading, or
- Developers without the industry experience but with the ability to realize that there may be more to the requirements than meets the eye, ask the right questions and present efficient and practical solutions.
The main difference is that traders establish trading strategies and actively take positions in the market; it is key to be able to intuitively understand the opportunities in the market and make decisions fast. Quants are complex problem solvers who analyse trades to find inefficiencies and work on building and improving trading algorithms to make sure our strategies are always ahead of the game.
We are continuously hiring for our 3 keys roles, so there is no strict deadline for the application or set starting date. However, we do prefer graduate candidates to start in groups. This is because of the training that we offer at the beginning of your career at Da Vinci. Normally we have training classes starting in March, July, and September. We believe it’s nicer for newcomers to start together with a few more people, so they can easily connect with their peers in their first weeks and support each other in the learning process. In any case, we always discuss a preferred starting date with the candidate and we can be quite flexible.