2026 Cohort · Applications Open

Learn to build lending software the way it will be built in 2030.

A highly selective six-month fellowship for India's most promising early-career engineers. Ship production credit infrastructure at Nexo with Claude Code as your primary collaborator — and leave with skills no bootcamp, no degree, and no ordinary job can teach.

Stipend
₹1,00,000 / mo
Duration
Six months
Location
Remote · India
Cohort size
Twelve
Acceptance
< 2%
Fellows have joined from IIT Bombay · BITS Pilani · IIIT Hyderabad · Self-taught, open source · Razorpay · Jupiter · CRED
01 · Our Thesis

The engineers who matter in lending are changing.

In five years, the best engineers in fintech will not be the ones who type fastest. They will be the ones who orchestrate agents, reason about regulatory surfaces, and compress six weeks of work into an afternoon — without shipping a single bug into production.

India does not yet have a training ground for those engineers. We are building one.

Domain

Lending is the hardest software problem in fintech.

Credit decisioning, regulatory reporting, collections, and fraud — each layer touches money, identity, and the RBI. A single bad deploy can cost crores or a licence. This is where careful engineering still matters most.

Tooling

Claude Code changes what one engineer can ship.

Used well, it collapses what used to take a senior team into focused work for a single fellow. Used poorly, it produces slop. The difference is taste, judgement, and a craft we can teach.

Talent

India's best early-career engineers deserve a harder room.

You do not grow by shipping CRUD screens at a service company for three years. You grow by solving real problems, shoulder-to-shoulder with people who have done it before.

We are not looking for the finished engineer. We are looking for the one who will define what a finished engineer means in this decade.

— The Fellowship Founding Team
02 · The Filter

Who we're looking for.

This fellowship is deliberately narrow. We select twelve people per year from thousands of applicants. The shape of a strong candidate is specific, and the filter is honest.

You are probably a fit if

  • You have 0–3 years of professional experience
    Or a body of self-directed work — open source, side projects, internships — that reads like the same amount of craft.
  • You write non-trivial code and reason about systems
    You've built something with a database, a queue, and a user, and you know why each piece is there.
  • You have opinions about Claude Code, Cursor, or agents
    You've tried them. You've burned hours on them. You have a sense of where they shine and where they fail.
  • You are hungry to understand money
    Interest rates, default curves, underwriting, NBFC regulation — you don't need to know these yet, but you want to.
  • You have taste
    You can look at a PR, an API design, or a UI and tell the difference between "it works" and "it is right."

You are probably not a fit if

  • You are looking for a comfortable first job
    This is not that. The learning curve is vertical for the first month.
  • You think AI replaces the need to learn fundamentals
    It does the opposite. Fellows who thrive here read source code, write careful tests, and care about correctness.
  • You can't commit forty hours per week for six months
    This includes full-time students who cannot take a leave. We have a separate summer programme — ask us about it.
  • You need to be managed
    Fellows are trusted with production systems from week two. That trust is given, not earned through check-ins.
03 · The Role

What you'll actually do.

The fellowship is a job, not a course. You'll be paired with a senior Nexo engineer, given real ownership, and shipped into production. The arc below is deliberate — each phase earns the next.

Weeks 01 — 04
Foundations

Claude Code fluency and the lending map.

Work through a purpose-built curriculum: agentic patterns, subagent orchestration, skill authoring, MCP integrations, and the shape of the Nexo codebase. In parallel, learn the lending stack — origination, underwriting, KYC, credit bureaux, disbursal, collections — at a depth most engineers three years in do not have.

Weeks 05 — 12
First ship

Own and ship a production feature.

Take a real user-facing or infrastructure feature from spec to deploy, pairing with a senior engineer and Claude Code. Write the tests, the migration, the rollout plan, the post-mortem. Everything gets reviewed. Nothing gets merged without your name on it.

Weeks 13 — 20
Depth

A hard problem you wouldn't touch anywhere else.

Credit decisioning model deployment. A compliance-grade audit trail. A fraud pattern no one has caught yet. Pick one, scoped with a staff engineer, and own the full arc. This is the work we'll evaluate your fellowship on.

Weeks 21 — 26
Public work

Teach what you learned. In public.

Every fellow publishes — a technical essay, an open-source skill or pattern, or a piece of internal tooling released to the community. The best writing from each cohort becomes canonical reference for how AI-assisted engineering is done in regulated industries.

04 · Compensation

What you receive.

The stipend is the floor, not the point. The point is that for six months, nothing stands between you and doing the best work of your life.

Monthly stipend
₹1,00,000

Paid on the first of every month. ₹6,00,000 across the fellowship. No performance clawbacks.

Equipment & tooling
Fully covered

MacBook Pro of your choice. Claude Pro subscription. Any IDE, any book, any course. We pay for what you need the day you need it.

Mentorship
One-on-one

Weekly review with a senior engineer. Monthly founder sit-down. Quarterly external critique from engineers at companies we admire.

Top fellows
After the fellowship
FTE offer at Nexo

Top performers receive a senior engineer offer with competitive cash and meaningful equity. If it's not the right fit, we'll actively help place you elsewhere — our alumni network is the whole point.

05 · Selection

How we choose.

The process is designed to be honest, fast, and hard. We will not leave you waiting for weeks. We will also not let anyone in who has not earned the seat.

01

Written application

Resume plus three short essays. No GPA, no coaching-class-friendly questions. We want to understand how you think, what you've built, and why this.

~ 45 min
02

Take-home challenge

A realistic, scoped lending problem. Solve it with Claude Code and submit the result with your full commit history and a written reflection on what worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently.

72 hours
03

Live pairing session

Ninety minutes solving a novel problem alongside a Nexo engineer. No tricks. We're watching how you think, how you use your tools, and how you respond when something breaks.

90 min
04

Values & founder interview

A conversation with the founding team and CHRO. We're trying to understand what you want out of the next ten years, and whether this fellowship is the fastest path to it. It's a two-way interview.

60 min

Cohort timeline

May 2026
Applications open
Jun 30, 2026
Applications close
Aug 01, 2026
Cohort begins
Jan 31, 2027
Fellowship ends · FTE decisions
06 · FAQ

Questions we get often.

If your question isn't here, write to us. We read every email.

Do I need prior experience in lending or fintech? +

No. We teach the domain. What we can't teach is curiosity, craft, and the willingness to do hard things. Several of our strongest candidates have never touched financial software in their lives.

Is this open to engineers from non-tier-one colleges or without a degree? +

Yes, and we mean it. The application asks about what you've built, not where you studied. Some of our most interesting applicants are self-taught. We read everyone's submission.

What if I already have a full-time job? +

The fellowship requires a full-time commitment for six months. You'll need to resign or take sabbatical to join. Several of our fellows do this. It's a deliberate filter.

Can I apply from a tier-two or tier-three city? +

Yes. The fellowship is remote-first and works from anywhere in India with a stable internet connection. We hold one in-person gathering per cohort, and we pay for travel.

What if I don't get an FTE offer at the end? +

You leave with six months of world-class work, a public portfolio, a written recommendation, and an alumni network that spans the Indian fintech ecosystem. We actively help fellows who aren't converted find their next role. We take this responsibility seriously.

Is this a paid internship? +

No. It's a fellowship. The distinction matters. Interns get tasks. Fellows get ownership, a voice in decisions, and their name on production code. The stipend reflects that.

Is there an application fee? +

No. There has never been a fee. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not us.

If you've read this far, you already know.

Applications for the 2026 cohort close on the 30th of May.