Vendor lineage
EPAM Systems - the corridor between two worlds, and what a war did to it
Founded in a New Jersey apartment and a Minsk basement in 1993; by 2022 it had 14,000 engineers in Ukraine and 18,000 in Belarus and Russia, and the founder's silence became the story.
EPAM Systems is an American software engineering services company founded in 1993 by two Belarusian schoolfriends, one in Princeton and one in Minsk, that grew into an S&P 500 constituent delivering engineering from Eastern Europe to Western clients.
The name is an abbreviation of Effective Programming for America, and the founding arrangement was exactly that: in 1993 Arkadiy Dobkin, two years out of Minsk, sold the work from his apartment in New Jersey while his schoolfriend Leo Lozner ran the engineers from the basement of his building in Minsk. The Soviet Union had trained a very large number of very good programmers and then ceased to exist; the company was built on the difference between what they cost in Belarus and what their work was worth in America, and on making that difference trustworthy across a border.
Minsk got a proper delivery centre in 1994, Budapest in 1995, and Ukraine from 2000, which became the largest engineering base of all. The company listed in New York in 2012 - the first from Belarus to do so - and became an S&P 500 constituent with more than sixty thousand people in over fifty countries. Dobkin ran it for thirty-two years, until he became executive chairman on 1 September 2025 and handed the chief executive's post to Balazs Fejes; his mother had escaped the Minsk ghetto at fifteen.
Then the two halves of the model went to war with each other. At the start of 2022 the company had about 14,000 employees in Ukraine and 18,000 in Belarus and Russia. When Russia invaded on 24 February, the founder's public statement named neither Russia, nor Putin, nor his native Belarus, and he declined calls to put the company's infrastructure at the service of the Ukrainian side. The reaction inside and outside the company was severe. His defence, as reported, was that the company could not let its systems be used for cyberattacks and that it had to protect the people in Russia and Belarus from the political reprisals common there. Both the statement and the criticism belong in the record; what a founder owed to which of his employees that week is not a question the record settles.
What the company then did is less ambiguous: it suspended its operations in Russia and Belarus - the country it came from - and moved a large part of its workforce, with their families, out of the war's path. The Huawei and Atos entries ask where a supplier is incorporated. This one asks where its people are, and shows that a services company is a set of human beings in specific places, and that a border running through the middle of it is not an abstraction. Every buyer of offshore engineering since has had to ask which side of which line the people doing the work are on.
- HandWiki: EPAM was founded in 1993 by Arkadiy Dobkin, who had emigrated from Belarus two years earlier, and his former schoolmate Leo Lozner; it began from Dobkin's apartment in New Jersey while the first engineers worked from the basement of the building where Lozner lived in Minsk; at the start of 2022 it employed about 14,000 people in Ukraine, and after the invasion of 24 February it implemented relocation measures and faced criticism over a founder's statement that did not identify Russia as the aggressor
- AIN.UA, 2 March 2022: four days after the invasion began, Dobkin's statement on LinkedIn 'wasn't welcomed among the Ukrainian EPAM workers', who asked why it did not call the war Russia's aggression supported by Belarus; the company has '14,000 workers' in Ukraine; his following letter to all employees, in which 'there was not a word that Russia and Belarus started a war' (read 2026-10-18)
- AIN.UA, 4 March 2022: EPAM pulls out of Russia; 'CEO Arkadiy Dobkin avoided mentioning the participation of Belarus and Russia in the war' (read 2026-10-18)
- Company profile: the name derives from Effective Programming for America; the first Minsk delivery centre opened in 1994, Budapest in 1995, and Ukraine in 2000, which became the largest delivery country; the IPO on 8 February 2012 priced at 12 dollars and raised about 72 million; following the conflict beginning February 2022 the company suspended operations in Russia and Belarus and undertook a significant workforce relocation
- EPAM Systems, Form 8-K exhibit 99.3, Newtown, Pa., 8 May 2025: 'EPAM Announces Planned Leadership Succession', Dobkin to become executive chairman and Balazs Fejes chief executive, effective 1 September 2025; 1993, 'Founded EPAM Systems'; 2012, 'Led EPAM's successful Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange'; 2021, 'Guided EPAM's inclusion in the S&P 500 Index'; 'over 61,000 professionals across more than 55 countries' (read 2026-10-18)
- EPAM Systems, Form 8-K, 27 August 2025: effective 1 September 2025 the board appointed Dobkin executive chairman, continuing as chair, and Balazs Fejes chief executive officer and president (read 2026-10-18)
- dev.by, 1 September 2025: Dobkin steps down after 32 years leading EPAM; born on 3 June 1960 in Minsk; his mother escaped from the Minsk ghetto at 15 to a partisan detachment, in his own account to Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2012; he left for the United States in 1991 (read 2026-10-18)