Branch International

Job description

Branch Overview Branch is a leading AI-powered lending fintech with 50M+ downloads across India and Africa. We use alternative data and machine learning to expand financial access for millions of people traditionally excluded from the formal financial system. Founded by the former CEO of Kiva.org and backed by leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, and the IFC, Branch combines mission-driven impact with world-class technology and scale. In India, Branch operates as a regulated digital lending institution and Middle Layer NBFC, building trusted and accessible financial products for millions of customers across the country. Our 250+ member India team is growing rapidly and works across technology, data science, risk, product, and operations to solve high-impact problems at scale. Certified as a Great Place to Work in 2025, Branch offers the opportunity to build meaningful careers while shaping the future of inclusive fintech in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies. Job Overview As a company, we are passionate about our customers, fearless in the face of barriers, and driven by data. As an engineering team, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making: We believe the best ideas can come from anyone in the company, and we are working hard to create an environment where everyone feels empowered to propose solutions to the challenges we face. We are looking for individuals who thrive in a fast-moving, innovative, and customer-focused setting. About the Role As a software engineering intern, you will work closely with experienced engineers at Branch and make significant contributions to our products and code base for 4-6 months. You will brainstorm, design, code, debug, and ship features serving our millions of customers while picking up skills necessary for your career. Responsibilities Build out functionality for existing and new product lines and platforms such as Credit, Payments, KYC, Data Platforms, etc. Integrate with various third-party systems, including payment systems, identity providers, and messaging platforms. Qualifications Have some experience building Backend that are more than just toy projects. Applications that have real users or an open source project would be a great plus. You have a solid foundation in computer science fundamentals, distributed systems, data storage. Know your way through various flavors of Unix and commonly used command line utilities. Proficiency with at least one mainstream language like Python, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, etc. You are highly entrepreneurial. You take the initiative to solve problems before they arise. You’ve started and/or contributed to projects you’re passionate about. You are a great collaborator and communicator. You know that startups are a team sport. You listen to others, speak your mind, and ask the right questions. You are excited by the prospect of working in a distributed team and company, working with teammates from all over the world, and learning. Core Engineering Expectations The following describes the traits we expect in our engineers, and reflects instincts developed over years of shipping real software. If you are early in your career, we do not expect you to demonstrate all of it yet — but we do expect a genuine appreciation for why these qualities matter, an honest sense of where you stand against them, and the drive to close the gap. Engineering craft and judgment You balance technical excellence with business and consumer needs. You research and seek opinions to identify the best solution for a problem, not just the first one that comes to mind. You intentionally weigh technical debt, ensuring it is paid down before it compounds. You have a deep understanding of web fundamentals, data modeling, and distributed systems. You apply proven design patterns to build modular, scalable solutions and ensure that security, performance, and observability are baked into your work from the outset. You use automated testing as both a blueprint for clean architecture and a safety net for refactoring. You believe that well-designed code should be inherently testable, and you hold all contributions, whether human or AI generated, to the same standard of quality and maintainability. You are comfortable navigating and evaluating unfamiliar codebases. You can integrate into and evolve existing architectures with care, researching thoroughly and seeking peer feedback to ensure your changes improve the system without breaking it. You understand the full software development lifecycle. You can break down ambiguous projects into granular, estimable tasks that can be delegated effectively, ensuring a predictable and transparent path to delivery. You treat your delivery commitments as something the rest of the team plans against. You consider the ripple effects of your work. You think critically about how your choices impact the end user, the business, and the team’s future velocity, and you have the drive to master the domain knowledge required to make those calls. You partner with product, design, and other functions to shape the work, not just receive it. You push back when the spec is wrong, ask the question that reframes the problem, and share ownership of whether the thing was worth building in the first place. AI proficiency AI fluency is table stakes. You use AI to amplify your logic, not to replace it. You decompose ambiguous problems into clear steps and dependencies before prompting, ensuring you drive the architecture rather than allowing the AI to improvise a structure that compounds errors at high speed. You hold AI-generated output to the same rigorous standards as human written code. You have the intuition to catch hallucinations of correctness, e.g. elegant looking code that fails subtly or tests that pass without actually asserting logic, and you take total accountability for the final implementation. Your trust is calibrated through experience; you can clearly articulate your