The contest included two tracks: one for ideas and prototypes and another – for ongoing projects. In the final round, ten student finalists presented their projects to the company’s dev team. The experts judged the projects based on four main criteria: practical value, innovation, scalability, and presentation quality.
“The Roast is a logical next step for the Master's program that we run jointly with Ozon Tech. Together, we not only ensure that our students get fundamental education, but also introduce them to their future working environments from the first year of their studies to make them feel like part of a big team. The most valuable part of the contest is the open dialogue. Experts don’t look down upon the students; they treat them as colleagues, offering honest and on-point feedback to help them grow professionally. We want our students to not be afraid of such communication, believe in themselves, and know that initiative matters,” notes Elena Boldyreva, a manager of ITMO’s Design and Development of Big Data Systems Master’s program.
Three first-year Master’s students and three Bachelor's students from the Faculty of Software Engineering and Computer Systems received a 120,000-ruble scholarship each. A special monetary prize of 150,000 rubles was awarded to Anastasiya Sashina with the project Replication of a B-tree Search Index Using Conflict-Free Replicated Data Structures.
Anastasiya Sashina at the awards ceremony. Photo by the Ozon press office
Other winners:
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Dmitriy Kurochka with the project AutoFuel: A Contactless Payment Service for Fuel Stations;
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Kirill Pryanichnikov with the project A Pipeline for Predicting Purchase Probability Based on Customer Behavior;
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Aleksandr Shadruhin with the project A Streaming Pipeline for Processing User Events in E-Commerce Analytics;
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Timofey Ermakov with the project Tiley: A Distributed AI-Powered Platform for Micro-Image Labeling – also a winner in the Audience Award category;
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Artyom Vichuk with the project Formalizing and Automating Service Level Agreement (SLA) Control for Airflow-Based Data Pipelines;
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Maksim Polukhin with the project A Pipeline for Real-Time Search Index Synchronization.
“We signed a cooperation agreement with the university late last year and now ITMO is one of our key partner universities in IT in Russia. At the contest, students had the chance to not only try their hand at practical cases, but also learn what knowledge and skills are currently in demand on the market. By doing so, we give our share to IT education in Russia and bridge the gap between academia and bigtech,” says Anastasiya Pshenichnova, the head of Ozon’s Department for Educational Projects.
ITMO collaborates with Ozon in several fields. In 2025, the company became an industrial partner of such programs as Design and Development of Big Data Systems, Computer Technologies in AI, and Software Engineering. Through this partnership, students can gain access to infrastructure, expertise, and real-world business cases. Additionally, Ozon holds regular career days and educational events at ITMO.
