Arkadiy Dobkin and the visitors who came to say no

The visitors had come to Minsk to stop the project. Arkadiy Dobkin’s team had been asked to build a software prototype for SAP in three months, a timetable that had begun to look optimistic even to the people who proposed it. Dobkin remembered meeting the delegation in a hotel. His office, he thought, might alarm them. The software had a better chance of making a good impression.

It did. The visitors took the work back. Soon came an invitation to continue, and eventually three EPAM people were demonstrating the prototype in a private room at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando. An assignment that might have ended with a polite apology became a relationship with a global software company.

There is a useful distinction between having a promising idea and having something ready when the skeptics arrive. Dobkin’s career has repeatedly occupied the distance between the two. He has spent decades connecting engineers whom customers barely knew with problems those customers could no longer ignore.

A programmer arrives with an inconvenient proposition

Dobkin was born in Minsk in 1960. He trained in electrical engineering and worked in the programming department of the Institute of Powder Metallurgy. In 1987, as Soviet economic reforms opened room for cooperatives, he started a software business while continuing his institute work. Entrepreneurship entered his life before the American address did.

He emigrated to the United States in 1991. His early American experience included washing dishes in a pizzeria, an episode he later discussed with an interviewer. The detail is appealing precisely because it is so ordinary. An engineering background does not automatically translate into a job in a new country. For a while, the work available and the work he knew how to do were different things.

Technical employment followed, including work at Prudential and Colgate-Palmolive. In 1993, he and Leonid Lozner founded EPAM, joining an American business presence to engineering talent in Minsk. The arrangement gave Dobkin a proposition he was remarkably willing to repeat: people back home could build software for customers here.

His persistence initially had limited commercial value. Talking about capable programmers is easy. Persuading a customer to entrust them with a consequential system requires someone to take a risk. Dobkin kept talking anyway. A colleague who moved to Bally eventually called. That connection helped turn the proposition into paid work.

The shoe company, the toothpaste company, the software company

The early customers make an unusually practical cast of characters. Bally needed North American warehouse and logistics software. Colgate-Palmolive needed a sales system. These were businesses with goods to move and salespeople to support. For EPAM, useful work came before a famous name.

Dobkin’s Colgate work also supplied a route into SAP. The sales software attracted attention, and SAP initially associated it with Siebel, a rival. Discovering that a small Minsk team had built it changed the conversation. Hasso Plattner, SAP’s co-founder, offered the prototype assignment that would produce the anxious hotel demonstration.

By Dobkin’s account, EPAM’s relative unfamiliarity with older systems helped it consider newer technical approaches. The team subsequently learned through close work with SAP and Microsoft. That combination matters: it brought a small engineering outfit into contact with the demands of large enterprise software, while giving it room to work with newer technology.

The lesson is pleasantly resistant to a motivational poster. There was luck, as Dobkin readily acknowledged. There were also former colleagues, a working system, a demanding deadline and people prepared to inspect the result. The breakthrough had dependencies. An engineer would appreciate that.

The business behind other people’s products

EPAM’s public-market debut came on February 8, 2012. Its shares traded under the company’s own name, EPAM. Nineteen years separated the founding from that first trading day. The interval is a useful corrective to the compressed version of entrepreneurship, in which an idea appears on Monday and a stock exchange politely clears its calendar for Friday.

Software engineering services can be difficult to describe at a dinner table. The customer’s product gets the visible name. The systems underneath it attract attention when they fail. Dobkin has described EPAM’s work through the image of software buildings and cities: places that businesses and their customers inhabit, and that must keep adapting as their populations change.

It is an apt image for his own position. His professional identity rests on building the capacity to build for others. The software must do a job; the organization must keep finding people who can do the next one. Each successful project becomes evidence for a larger assignment.

On December 14, 2021, EPAM joined the S&P 500. A company begun across small American and Belarusian operations had become part of a widely followed American stock index. Dobkin was still leading it. The milestone marked institutional arrival, although it offered no exemption from the next round of difficult decisions.

Opportunity needs an address

Dobkin’s interest in the region extended beyond EPAM’s own contracts. He participated in the development of Belarus’s High-Tech Park framework, describing discussions in the early 2000s about conditions that would let local software businesses compete internationally. Predictability mattered alongside incentives. A company selling across borders needed some confidence about the rules at home.

His account gives several people a part in that process, including Valery Tsepkalo and officials connected to the Academy of Sciences. EPAM helped prepare an early draft. It is a less cinematic form of entrepreneurship than a software demonstration, but the underlying concern was similar: make it possible for capable people to sell their work.

At a European business gathering in 2021, he made the regional argument in unusually direct terms. “As far as highly paid jobs exist in the country, smart people stay in the country,” he said. Corporate headquarters drew less of his attention than the opportunities available to the people doing the work.

That year, GLOBSEC gave him its Tatra Summit Business Leadership Award, recognizing his contribution to the Central and Eastern European technology business environment. The ceremony took place in Slovakia’s High Tatras. His stated hope was that EPAM’s example would encourage talent and other innovative companies in the region to participate in global markets.

There is a particular logic here for an immigrant entrepreneur. He had moved himself. His business helped make it possible for other engineers to work internationally from where they were. Both routes depended on customers learning to see professional ability beyond a familiar address.

Then the map had to change

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made EPAM’s geographic concentration an immediate operational challenge. The company had substantial teams across the region. Its response included employee relocation and a decision to leave Russia. The business Dobkin had built around cross-border work now had to reconsider the borders themselves.

By May 2023, he was discussing India as a strategic location for that adjustment. EPAM had about 6,000 people there, and he described the possibility of doubling that number over several years, depending on the global economy. He also pointed to Latin America as a region for faster expansion.

Those were plans expressed at a particular moment, rather than a completed scorecard. Their significance lies in the shift they reveal. The early business connected a relatively concentrated engineering base to international clients. The later business needed a broader distribution of talent. The original insight could travel; its operating map had to be redrawn.

“you can do something from almost nothing”

Arkadiy Dobkin, on the culture he wants EPAM to retain

Growing also brought a quieter organizational problem. In a 2023 conversation, Dobkin said EPAM had gone public with roughly 7,000 people and no global head of HR. Independent directors helped add corporate experience around the listing. He wanted that maturity to coexist with the initiative of people who had built something themselves.

He also emphasized keeping founders from acquired companies involved in meaningful leadership roles. The arrangement asks an interesting question of a large business: can it offer entrepreneurs enough room to keep acting like entrepreneurs? An acquisition can buy a company. Keeping its builders interested takes additional work.

A founder’s second job

On September 1, 2025, Dobkin became executive chairman. Balazs Fejes took over as president and chief executive. Fejes had joined EPAM in 2004 through its acquisition of Fathom Technology, which he had co-founded. The new CEO’s route into the business gave the argument about retaining acquired founders a concrete ending.

Dobkin’s new responsibilities include long-term strategy, important client and partner relationships, and guidance on strategic initiatives. The handover separated the chief executive and chair roles while keeping the principal founder involved. It changed his place in the organization he had spent more than three decades building.

“EPAM has been the defining project of my professional and personal journey,” he said when the succession was announced. It is a substantial description of a working life. It also leaves room for the next chief executive to have a working life of his own.

EPAM reported $5.457 billion in 2025 revenue, up 15.4%. That headline needs its accompanying detail: organic growth at constant exchange rates was 4.9%, and GAAP operating income fell 4.5%. A larger revenue total and a smaller operating profit can occupy the same year. The numbers resist an effortless victory lap.

Dobkin remained part of the public conversation in 2026. An April conference program in New York listed him for a discussion about building and evolving EPAM in the AI era. The technology had changed since the SAP prototype. The recurring question remained recognizable: what can this organization learn to build next?

The Minsk hotel episode is a good place to leave him. A small team had something to show. The visitors had reasons to doubt it. The work changed their minds. After the listings, acquisitions and change of title, that remains a satisfying way for an engineer to begin a conversation.