Careers at Andela
Mission
To find the brightest young people in Africa, train them to be world-class developers, and connect them with employers around the world looking for top technical talent.
Business Segments
Andela comprises of two primary regional business segments:
- Africa: Andela selects the top 1% of tech talent from one of the largest pools of untapped potential in the world — the African continent. The company develops successful applicants through 4 year Fellowship programmes based in Nairobi and Lagos (the company will shortly expand to a third African country).
- USA: Andela links Fellows with US tech firms; the fellows become full time employees in these companies, allowing US firms to access talented individuals from the African continent. Andela’s US operations, based in New York and San Francisco, focus on identifying and growing relationships with tech firms and ensuring that Fellows have the right skills to work with these companies.
History
Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not. This is the guiding principle underpinning Andela, a unique start up that is unleashing the great untapped resource of the African continent; the underutilised talent, brainpower and potential of its tech-savvy young people.
Andela has been described as Africa’s first elite engineering organisation. The 2 year old start-up recruits the most talented developers from the African continent and shapes them into technical experts and leaders through their Fellowship programmes. Fellowship places at Andela’s Nairobi and Lagos campuses are highly sought after, with fewer than 1% of hopefuls making it through the tough application process.
Those that make it onto the program undertake a four year curriculum of technical and business courses. Each fellow is also a full-time employee of a US tech company partnered with Andela. Companies ranging from IBM and Microsoft to small start-ups get access to the most capable and well trained developers from the African continent.
The company’s track record and ambition (they aim to train 100,000 developers over the next ten years; they are currently training 200) has attracted a great deal of interest from investors. Most notably, in June 2016 Andela became the recipient of the first lead investment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a social issue focused found established by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan. The $24 million investment is a huge vote of confidence in this young start-up’s potential.
Andela opened its San Francisco office in 2016 and has plans to expand into a third African nation.