Interswitch Developer Academy Adds Largest Intern Cohort

In Short

• Interswitch inducted its third and largest Developer Academy cohort.
• The company says it selected interns from more than 20,000 applications.
• The programme runs for nine months across five engineering tracks.

What Happened

Interswitch has announced the induction of the third and largest cohort of developer interns into its Developer Academy. The payments company said the cohort was selected from a pool of over 20,000 applications.

Candidates went through multiple screening stages, including technical assessments and interviews. Interswitch did not disclose how many interns were selected.

The nine-month programme covers Backend Development, DevOps, Mobile Development, Frontend Engineering, and Quality Assurance. Backend and frontend are the parts of software users do not see and the parts they do see. DevOps is the work that helps teams ship software reliably, like automated deployment and monitoring. Quality assurance is structured testing to catch bugs before users do.

Mitchell Elegbe, Interswitch founder and group CEO, framed the academy as a long-term talent pipeline. He pointed to skilled talent migration, often called brain drain, and said the response is to train more engineers at scale.

Franklin Ali, group chief human resources officer, said the academy is also meant to build professional habits, like discipline and adaptability, not just coding skills.

Why It Matters

Nigeria’s fintech and digital commerce companies keep hiring engineers across product development, infrastructure, and reliability. Structured internship pipelines can reduce onboarding time and help companies find job-ready talent faster.

For the wider ecosystem, programmes like this increase the supply of developers who can work locally or remotely for global teams. Even when some graduates leave, a larger skills base can still improve the depth of engineering talent available to startups, banks, and enterprise technology teams.

For readers tracking Interswitch, the scale of interest, over 20,000 applications, is another signal of how competitive entry-level software roles have become in Nigeria, especially in payments and financial services.