“We’re not just training coders. We’re preparing young Africans to compete at the highest level anywhere in the world.”

To execute this vision, Senior Program Manager Jerry Uke designed a rigorous, transformative 52-week experience. He focused on creating a complete learning journey where real-world discipline was paramount.

“We wanted a one-year program where ambition meets discipline, mentorship meets community, and talent grows through real projects,” Uke explained.

The initial screening was intense: out of over 4,000 applications, only 30 fellows were selected for Cohort 1. Over the course of the year, they navigated 400+ live sessions and completed over 50 projects, internalizing the principle that engineering is a rigorous craft dedicated to solving real problems.

The Mentor and the Methods

At the core of the backend track, instructor Rufai Mustapha, gobal talent builder, was the central force helping to turn raw global talent into capable engineers.

“Many junior engineers start with gaps in the basics,” Rufai noted. “Our goal was to give them a strong foundation, guide them through real projects, and help them gain the confidence to deliver value anywhere in the world.”

Rufai worked closely with 12 fellows, immersing them in the realities of production engineering: weekly one-on-one sessions on architecture and debugging, regular standups, and project-based learning focused on critical sectors like fintech, AI, and cloud systems.

The Evidence: Backend Track Fellow Spotlights

The true measure of the program lies in the hands of these individuals, the first wave of talent ready to define the future. Their stories are a testament to transformation and mastery in areas like Microservices Architecture, Security, and CI/CD.

Wemi Moyela: Making The Internet Fun Again

Wemi grew up exploring the world through the internet and was inspired by the possibilities it created for creativity and play.

As a Rise fellow, he strengthened his engineering foundations, learned to reason from first principles, and developed core competencies in distributed systems, observability, and production reliability. 

His final project, Moonfly, is a competitive fantasy investment game where players trade assets like stocks, crypto, and currencies against each other to experiment with markets without financial risk. He thinks the internet needs more things that are both genuinely useful and genuinely fun.

Adedamola Toye: The Social Impact Engineer

Adedamola rose from a foundational level of preparedness to architect AnonAlert, an anonymous crime-reporting platform with deep security implications. This project required mastering NestJS, Docker, and Kafka, proving he can engineer solutions with profound social impact.

Chukwuebuka Obiora: The Architect of Scale

Chukwuebuka speaks the language of high-performance systems. His capstone was a hotel booking platform with Microservices from the ground up. He engineered high-availability APIs and successfully integrated the Paystack API, showcasing his ability to manage complex, revenue-driven systems.

Tiffany Ugwunebo: The Leader & Builder

Tiffany transformed into a proven leader, securing a role at Applai Grants and building Pixel Hive, a sophisticated asynchronous multimedia processing service. 

She develops applications that integrate a wide range of external APIs, including GPT-4.1, the Hugging Face API, Stripe API, RapidAPI, and others.

Her work leverages queue-based architectures, Docker-powered deployments, microservices, and real-time communication using GraphQL. 

She is also highly proficient with JavaScript frameworks such as Hono, Express, NestJS, and React. Recognizing her “knack for sprint planning, division of labour and leadership,” she’s already set her sights on a future CTO role.  

Oluwafemi Ojuri: The Pragmatic Problem-Solver

Oluwafemi is an enthusiastic engineer who enjoys building software to solve problems, with careful focus on optimization. He started the cohort highly prepared and is exceptionally resourceful. 

His capstone project, Next-Fit, is a tool he built to scrape career pages, turning a personal need into a powerful application.  With techniques learnt during the program, he also built an AI-powered CBT system capable of assessing open-ended/theory questions for his final-year project.

Festus Idowu: The Prolific Shipper

Festus joined as a frontend dev seeking to master backend engineering and evolved as a systems-focused engineer building solutions across the stack. 

During the program, he launched AlgoX, a simplified data structures and algorithms learning platform currently serving 40 users, he developed Medisphere, a healthcare platform connecting patients with providers giving patients access and control over their data, and dp2png – a peer-to-peer payment platform for Nigerians to deposit and withdraw their Deriv funds. 

Through these projects, Festus learned system design, advanced data structures and algorithms, site reliability engineering practices, progressing from basic backend concepts to building systems.

Olalekan Ogundele: The Visionary Craftsman

Olalekan began with the goal of building for millions. His project, an “intelligent sales and customer engagement platform,” demonstrates his application of “system thinking, scalability principles and clean architecture.”

The Legacy of Growth and The Road Ahead

The program’s impact was swift and undeniable. One student, for example, secured a Meta internship before even finishing the program.

“Before Rise, I worked alone,” one student reflected. “Now I collaborate, get feedback, and build confidence. I did not think I could do this project, but I did.”

The academy proved that top-tier talent is here. As Cohort 2 expands to 100 fellows, adding design and cybersecurity tracks, the foundational goal holds fast.

“People do not have to work for Rise,” says Eke Urum. “They go anywhere, earn more, and deliver value. Rufai makes sure they are ready.”

Speaking on the spirit of developing global talent, Rufai Mustapha explained:

“I have had the privilege of mentoring this incredible cohort, and I am constantly amazed by their brilliance. Each one has a unique spark and the ability to build things that will change the world. I cannot wait for the world to see all the amazing things they can do.”

That’s how Rufai Mustapha explains his mission. In one sentence, it captures the two tracks of his career: building systems as a software engineer, and giving back through teaching and mentorship.

From startups to systems

Mustapha’s journey began in Nigeria’s fast-moving startup scene, where engineers often had to be more than just coders. At a web hosting service, he designed and built websites while writing documentation for in-house tools. At a digital media outfit, he managed projects and pitched products to clients.

Later, at a film-streaming service often described as “Netflix for renting Nigerian movies,” he built and improved the core Laravel platform, configured infrastructure on Digital Ocean, and kept cross-functional teams aligned.

For him, these years were not just about learning new frameworks or delivering features. They were about understanding how software becomes a product people can trust.

“It taught me to think like a builder, not just a programmer,” he says.

Mentorship as giving back

Even while building systems, Mustapha felt the pull of teaching. At a pan-African training company, he guided more than 2,000 students into careers in web and Android development.

His team’s resources were so effective they were later adopted by a Nigerian state government. At another academy, he designed programs that boosted graduate hire rates by 10 percent.

In 2022, his dedication to giving back was recognized when Google selected him as a mentor for the Africa Developer Scholarship supported by Andela. Over several months, he worked with learners across Africa, helping them navigate difficult concepts in web and Android tracks.

Some of his mentees landed their first jobs in fintech and mobile development. “The best part is getting that message that says, ‘I got the job,’” he recalls. “It reminded me that mentorship is as important as code.”

Teaching at scale

Mentorship soon extended into classrooms far beyond Lagos. In the UK, Mustapha trained women breaking into tech. In Germany, he mentored migrants rebuilding careers in a new country.

On global platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight, his courses have reached thousands. On freeCodeCamp, his tutorials on React and SVG mapping have been read by tens of thousands across continents.

For him, teaching is not about broadcasting knowledge but about breaking down complexity. “I want people to see that they can build too,” he says.

Speaking for ecosystems

His engineering background also pushed him into advocacy roles. At one of Africa’s leading payments companies, he overhauled API documentation and demo guides used by over 10,000 developers and merchants.

He has since spoken at more than 50 conferences across Africa and Europe, reaching thousands of developers with talks that mix live code, strategy, and storytelling.

At Write the Docs Prague, he delivered a message that resonated deeply: African startups cannot afford to ignore documentation. “Good documentation is not a luxury,” Rufai Mustapha said. “It drives adoption, it convinces investors, and it keeps ecosystems alive.”

Building communities

Beyond code and classrooms, Rufai Mustapha invests in building ecosystems. He co-hosts the EMEA chapter of Write the Docs, creating space for African engineers and writers to connect with their global peers.

He also leads Open Source Community Africa, a collective that encourages contributions from African developers to global projects.

The mission ahead

From coding startups in Lagos to mentoring through Google’s continent-wide program, from publishing courses on LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight to speaking on world stages, Rufai Mustapha’s story keeps circling back to the same mission.

“I started out wanting to build software,” he says. “Now I see that the real measure of what I build is the people who grow because of it.”

Code is what he builds. People are why he builds.