Percussion Labs

Learn how to build
quality software

A six-month, paid fellowship for early-career engineers to research, reason, build, and develop the intuition required to create great software in the age of AI.

Learn more
Duration

6 months

Commitment

25–30 hrs a week

Stipend

₦100,000 a month

Location

Remote (Nigeria)

Hi there!

My name is JT, and I lead the team here at Percussion Labs. I’ve been a software engineer for about a decade. During that period, I’ve led teams, worked on different projects, and built really cool stuff (you could check my LinkedIn here for more).

The core theme of my career so far has been building really thoughtful projects: taking the time to reason about architecture, finding innovative ways to solve problems, and then actually building. In every team I have had the opportunity to lead, this has been my greatest emphasis.

One of the key driving forces behind Percussion Labs is to develop engineers who know what it means to build thoughtful things in an era where it seems like solutions are more important than processes. It is about being able to develop engineers who can actually think.

The Beautiful Engineering Fellowship is designed to do just that.

It’s a paid 6-month program designed solely for early-stage engineers where you get to do a lot of meaningful research and engineering, with a goal of being a product-minded engineer at the end.

This fellowship will be
great for you if

  1. You deeply consider software engineering to be a good career path (I mean, you're actually passionate about software engineering, not solely because it might be an economically viable path).
  2. You are a young, early-career software engineer with a maximum of 2 years of building experience
  3. You know how to write code in PHP/Laravel (or can pick it up in a very short time)
  4. You love solving problems and finding connections between different problems
  5. You are self-driven. You love reading and doing independent research
  6. You always seek to understand the “why” and the “how” of things, not just the “what”
  7. You pay serious attention to detail (to show you read this part, find a way to include the word “beautyful” — spelt exactly this way — somewhere in your application)
  8. You have 6 months of free time on your hands!

What this fellowship is not

Not a coding school

It’s important that I mention that this fellowship is not designed to teach you the fundamentals of writing code. While I would really love for this to be the case in future cohorts, I currently do not have the bandwidth to teach coding from first principles.

As such, a basic expectation is that you already know how to write code by hand (without the assistance of an AI code-generation tool).

Not a regular SWE job

It's also key to mention that the fellowship is not the same as a regular software engineering job. While a job is focused more on the outputs and less on the engineer, this fellowship is aimed at building skills and doing strong research.

As such, the projects you’ll be building are aimed at building your individual intuition and problem-solving skills, not at simply delivery working solutions.

Expectations at the end
of the fellowship:

  1. You know how software architecture works
  2. You know the important things to think about when building a software system
  3. You can build a software system of medium scale
  4. You have developed an intuition for how to write complex code without using an AI code-generation tool
  5. You know what it means to build software that requires integrating with an AI tool on a systems level
  6. You know what it means to be an AI engineer, and you can build an AI workflow end to end

What you get

Perks

₦100,000 / month

Monthly remuneration, throughout the fellowship.

  • API access to GPT and Claude for experiments
  • Cursor Pro
  • Books, learning materials and bi-monthly sessions with experienced engineers

Beautiful Engineering Fellowship

Ready to build
beautiful software?

Applications for this cohort closed on .