Andela Announces Global Expansion With Developers in 37 Countries Including Latin America

Ten months after shutting down its physical offices, engineering talent company, Andela, is now going global. This means that the company is now onboarding engineers from every country around the world.

The tech company was founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Nadayar Enegesi, Ian Carnevale, Brice Nkengsa and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji.

Launched in Lagos in 2014 and incorporated in the United States, Andela has expanded its operations in a series of steps. It stopped hiring junior developers and laid off about 400 of them in September 2019 when it became difficult to find job placements for them.

The talent outsourcing startup let go of another set of 135 engineers and focused on hiring ready-made developers in February 2020.

It continued hiring senior-level engineers and went fully remote in June 2020. From then on, it expanded its pool of developers to include those from other African countries.

In the last 6 months, the startup has seen a 750% increase in applications outside Africa. 30% of the applications for engineering positions with the company came from non-African countries with Latin America accounting for half of this population. Following the growing response of non-African talents to Andela, the company is now onboarding talent from anywhere in the world.

Within the same number of months, it also saw a 500% increase in the volume of applications received from Africa. This shows that a budding interest still exists among African developers to work with the New York-based tech firm. However, the competition has gotten stiffer as the company now has a global focus to replace its hitherto African focus.

Jeremy Johnson, Andela’s co-founder and CEO said, “Before the pandemic, Andela was opening applications in country after country. The pandemic came and changed that as we opened up to the entire continent.

“That went so well and we thought ‘what if we accelerated it now that we’re remote and just enable applicants from anywhere?’ because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question. We did that and it’s been an amazing experiment.”

Currently, the talent outsourcing company has engineers from 37 countries which include Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America. It serves customers which include InVision, ViacomCBS, Pluralsight, Seismic, Cloudflare, Coursera and GitHub. Working with developers in different countries will allow the company to match talent with demand in each region as well as let the engineers prove themselves globally.