Android Engineer Intern

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.

About Role As an Android Intern, you will improve the Branch Android app by building new features, optimizing performance, and contributing to the overall technical direction of the app. You will work closely with other Android engineers, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and Designers on various challenges and deliver a smooth and reliable user experience. You will actively participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and day-to-day collaboration with the team.You will take ownership of projects and features, driving them end-to-end from development to release. You will also suggest improvements, share ideas, and contribute to technical and architectural discussions. 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. Responsibilities

• Building and improving features for the Branch Android app used by our customers. You will work on creating smooth, reliable, and user-friendly mobile experiences.

• Working closely with backend teams to integrate APIs and support new product features. You will help ensure the Android app works seamlessly with backend systems and services.

• Improving app performance, stability, and overall user experience. This includes fixing issues, reducing app crashes, and making the app faster and more reliable.

• Working closely with Product Managers, Designers, and other engineers to understand requirements and deliver features end to end. You will support the team in successfully delivering its goals and initiatives.

• Supporting integrations with third-party services such as payments, authentication systems, analytics, and marketing. You will help maintain and improve these integrations as the product grows.

• Participating in code reviews, technical discussions, and team collaboration activities. You will contribute ideas, learn from others, and help maintain good engineering practices within the team.

• Taking ownership of features and projects from development to release. You will be responsible for delivering quality work and ensuring a smooth rollout to users.

• Contributing to improving code quality, testing, and maintainability of the Android codebase. You will help the team build a strong and scalable mobile application over time.

Qualifications

• Have some experience building native Android applications that are more than just toy projects. Applications with real users or an open-source project would be a great plus.

• You have a solid foundation in computer science fundamentals. Good understanding of Android development using Kotlin, along with modern Android development practices and frameworks.

• Strong understanding of modern Android UI development using Jetpack Compose. Comfortable building responsive and scalable UI components, managing UI state, and following modern Android architecture and design patterns.

• Experience building features that interact with REST APIs and backend services. Familiarity with third-party integrations such as authentication, analytics, payments, or messaging platforms is a plus.

• Have a deep understanding of Android app performance, crash debugging, and improving app stability and reliability.

• Curious about new technologies and interested in learning different parts of the technology stack beyond mobile development when needed.

• Demonstrated fluency with modern AI-assisted development workflows and a point of view on their effectiveness for various use cases.

• Clear, structured written and verbal communication, comfortable operating async effectively.

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 technical reasoning whenever you choose to override an AI’s suggestion.

• You manage tool context deliberately to avoid “model noise” and recognize the point of diminishing returns. You know exactly when to leverage a prompt to accelerate your workflow and when to step back to solve a high-complexity problem through deep, independent thought.

• You proactively mitigate risks inherent to agentic workflows, including prompt injection, data leakage, and secret management. You treat AI-era security as a fundamental part of the engineering process, ensuring that “agentic” doesn’t mean “unsecured.”

• You aggressively automate the mundane so your attention is reserved for the complex logic and design decisions that actually need a human.

• You stay current with the evolving AI landscape and understand the underlying mechanics of the models and tools you use. You continuously raise your own productivity ceiling as the tools improve.

Operating principles

• You make high-velocity, high-quality decisions. You move fast where the cost of being wrong is low and reversible, slow down where it isn’t, and can articulate which mode you’re in and why.

• You are highly entrepreneurial and manage your own time, energy, and quality without oversight. You take the initiative to solve problems before they arise; nobody has to ask you twice, and often, nobody has to ask at all.

• You are inherently curious and a high-velocity learner who handles setbacks without losing momentum. You possess the grit to keep moving when things go sideways and the judgment to know exactly when to pull in help to stay on track.

• You have an uncompromising attention to detail. You catch the inconsistent behavior, the edge case bug, and the green test suite that doesn’t actually verify anything, maintaining a high bar for the small things that define quality.

• You simplify the complex. You write with the clarity of someone who expects to be read and ask the sharp, uncomfortable questions that often reveal hi