Artur Gogiyan

I am currently the backend lead for Delivery at Yandex Go. But I had quite a humble start. I was born in Malaya Purga, a rural locality in Udmurt Republic and I didn’t have a strong educational background. Nevertheless, I decided to apply to a university in a major city. I trained for my exams and I managed to secure a tuition-free position at ITMO’s Faculty of Software Engineering and Computer Systems in 2016. It wasn’t hard to train myself to solve typical exam problems, but in junior years I did feel my lack of solid background. Studies were tough: only 20% of students lasted into the final year. I had to study evenings and nights to make up for the gap in knowledge. The hardest part was to structure all the knowledge: at university, you are just thrown in the deep waters with a problem and you have to learn to get out of there on your own.

I landed my first job in the third year – I became a junior developer, working on a computational engine for digital tables. As for Yandex, I came there after five years of working in IT.

Now, I don’t just lead teams, but also engage a lot in HR – both for permanent positions and for internships. Here, the fundamental knowledge I gained at the university comes in handy: it helps me interview candidates and dive into new subject areas. Currently, there are a lot of motivated specialists on the market – not without contributions from ITMO – who learn quickly. That’s what we look for in our interns; they can grow into high-profile professionals. By the way, according to our stats, every fourth senior developer at Yandex used to be an intern here.

Dmitry Kukulidi

I head crowdsourced projects for R&D and Alice at Yandex. I studied at ITMO’s Faculty of Software Engineering and Computer Systems. In the last three years, I’ve been engaged in data marking: we help machine learning teams – Alice, YandexGPT, Shedevrum, Translator – collect and process data for training neural networks. I manage projects in different languages and lead a team of 16 people.

I came to Yandex as a Bachelor’s student – I applied as an engineering manager and became an intern. In this position, I developed an internal Telegram bot that would support employees working remotely. To get this job, I had to pass a seven-step process: three general interviews and four final ones with different teams. My internship lasted six months and I combined this part-time job with my studies. I actually spent more than the allotted 20 hours at work because I wanted to get everything I could from this new experience.

After the internship, I got a permanent position as a crowd solutions architect; here, my responsibilities were in the technical and organizational aspects of data marking – from collecting requirements to quality assessment. In a year, I became the informal head among that section of staff and later – the group leader. I think it became possible thanks to my proactive approach: I shared with my superiors that I wanted to grow vertically. I was given a chance and I used it; in time, I grew even more and became the superior of other superiors, growing my team from six to sixteen.

The training I got at ITMO has been really useful at my job. I came to the university from a humanities-focused school, so my math and programming skills left much to be desired – and I gained a solid foundation at the university.

There is a common belief among young specialists that they should start looking for jobs when they get a good grip on theory. Actually, the sooner you start putting your skills to practice, the better. Don’t be afraid to take on responsibility if you are ready for it and don’t hesitate to give feedback to your superiors – for instance, you should tell them that you want to grow.

Artem Zoshchuk

At ITMO, I studied at the Faculty of Secure Information Technologies, and now I work at Yandex, where I head the funtech (entertainment infrastructure) automation group.

I also started working during my studies: as a fourth-year, I passed the interview and became a tester at Yandex Mail. It was scary at first: I was afraid of doing something wrong and “breaking” the service that back then catered to 10 million customers. It turned out that this fear was exaggerated: at major companies, such errors are expected and quickly caught.

At Yandex Mail, I was taught to automate testing almost from the start and soon I headed one group and then two – for web and mobile versions of the service; later, I became the head of Yandex 360. However, I didn’t really enjoy managing such a big team, so I transferred to funtech. My current team develops tools for service automation and testing. I like the logic of testing and the fact that it ultimately aims to make users happy. There’s never a boring day at work – I regularly face new tasks and challenges; thanks to that, I always feel on top of my game.

These and other stories were shared at IT House Party, an informal open mic gathering at the Yandex x ITMO space on October 27, where students could ask questions on studies, internships, and work in bigtech.