Andela is hiring senior engineers from all African countries to double its talent pool

Andela, a leading global talent company, will now accept senior engineer applications from all African countries. This is part of efforts to double its talent pool since becoming a remote-first company.

The CEO of Andela, Jeremy Johnson, announced in May that the company is going fully remote. At the same time, 135 employees were laid off. Between September 2019 and May 2020, Andela has laid off over 500 employees.

Johnson explained that the lay-off and switch to fully remote operation are strategic business decisions. "We had a tough year in 2019", he wrote in an email.

Andela was founded in 2014 as a startup that trains, develop and connect tech talent to global opportunities. But in a bid to become profitable, Andela morphed into a company that provides engineering-as-a-service. It helps other companies to build their remote engineering teams.

As a fully remote company, Andela is now accepting applications from all African countries. In a statement sent to benjamindada.com, Andela said it is accepting applications for senior engineers who have an in-demand stack experience such as Node, React, Python and Ruby.

"By removing restrictions on location, we will double our talent pool to the 500,000 engineers in Africa", Johnson said. "Through Andela, these tech talents would be able to work with top international engineering teams".

Ultimately, he continued, "Our goal is to break down the barriers that prevent talent from connecting to opportunities. We are providing an easier and more efficient way for companies to scale their global engineering teams".

Over the past five years, we have become experts at identifying engineering excellence from non-traditional backgrounds. We know that there are extremely talented engineers across Africa and we believe that opportunity should not be limited by proximity to a major tech hub. Being a remote-first engineering organization allows us to open up access to Andela for engineers across the continent.

Andela serves clients across seven countries including the United States. Its headquarters is located in New York. Andela customers include Cloudflare, Wellio, ViacomCBS and Who Who Code.

Before becoming a fully remote company, Andela had offices across Africa. Notably, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. In 2018, it had piloted remote operations in Ghana, and in Egypt last year.

Andela said it would maintain its rigorous application process to build the strongest talent pool of software engineers on the continent.

"The world is beginning to realize that remote work is going to be a major catalyst for the democratization of opportunity", Johnson said. "Luckily, engineering leaders already know that remote work works if you have the right processes and systems in place, and are at the forefront of this change. By doubling our talent pool, we’re proud to help accelerate their critical work of building the future".

According to the statement, Andela will continue to invest in its learning community programme. Through its Learning Community, Andela had introduced over 100,000 learners from across the continent to software engineering.