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 over thirty years, one of a very small number of founders still leading an S&P 500 company; his mother had survived the Minsk ghetto.
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
- Wikipedia, EPAM Systems: during the 2022 invasion, tensions between the firm's 14,000 Ukrainian employees and its 18,000 Belarusian and Russian staff sparked dissension when the chief executive refrained from publicly condemning Russia; he defended the statement, which named neither Putin, Russia nor Belarus, saying the company could not use its infrastructure for cyberattacks and had to protect employees in Russia and Belarus from political reprisals; listed on the NYSE in 2012 as the first company from Belarus to do so
- 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
- Wikipedia, Arkadiy Dobkin: born in Minsk in 1960 into a Jewish family - his mother survived the Minsk ghetto - he emigrated to the United States in 1991 and co-founded EPAM in 1993, leading it for more than thirty years; as of July 2025 he was one of 24 chief executives in the S&P 500 to have led their company since its founding; the company operates in more than fifty countries with more than 60,000 employees and revenue above five billion dollars