Arkadiy Dobkin

Arkadiy Dobkin founded EPAM Systems in 1993 in Princeton, New Jersey, initially as a small software engineering outsourcing company leveraging technical talent from the former Soviet Union — primarily Belarus and Ukraine. Over three decades, he built EPAM into one of the world's premier digital transformation and software engineering firms, serving major clients in financial services, healthcare, retail, and technology with custom software development, platform engineering, and consulting services. EPAM's growth story was dramatically disrupted in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. At the time, approximately 14,000 of EPAM's 58,000 employees were based in Ukraine, with additional staff in Belarus and Russia. Dobkin led an extraordinary workforce relocation effort, helping thousands of employees and their families evacuate while simultaneously diversifying delivery to India, Latin America, Central Asia, and Western Europe. The company exited Russia and Belarus entirely. Dobkin's post-crisis strategy focuses on rebuilding geographic diversification, accelerating growth in India and Latin America as delivery hubs, investing in AI and generative AI capabilities to enhance engineering productivity, and winning larger transformation engagements with enterprise clients. His key challenges include managing pricing pressure in a competitive IT services market, demonstrating that the geographic diversification hasn't diluted engineering quality, and positioning EPAM as an AI-native engineering partner. Revenue growth, margin recovery, and AI-driven demand are the primary stock drivers.