The track TOP IT PRO is aimed at universities that demonstrate willingness to revamp their educational programs and become competence centers for partner universities. To be eligible for the contest, universities were required to develop a new top-level educational program geared towards specific roles and fields of study. In this regard, ITMO University combined the efforts of two of its departments – the Information Technologies and Programming Faculty and the Faculty of Applied Informatics – to create Software Engineering: AI Development and Deployment. The program will train specialists who can apply AI across the entire lifecycle of cloud and mobile product development. Graduates of the new program will be qualified to work as software engineers, DevOps engineers, MLOps engineers, and development team leads.
For the program’s implementation, ITMO University will be granted 196.4 million rubles in funding for a five-year period. This marks another milestone for the university in the federal IT education project. In 2025, ITMO topped the tables in the first TOP IT competition and received over 160 million rubles for its educational programs.
The program will be available for Bachelor’s students (Software Engineering, MLOps: AI Systems Management, and DevOps in Development and Management of Information Systems) who successfully pass an internal competition. From their first year, students can look forward to classes taught by experts from partner companies, as well as project activities, hackathons, top conferences, internships, and stipends from industrial partners regardless of the format of study.
TOP IT is an initiative that is implemented as part of the national project Data Economy and Digital Transformation of the Country and aimed at training top-level specialists in cooperation with leading IT companies. In two years, the project has welcomed 47 Russian universities, winners of the corresponding competitions. About 170 IT companies joined the program as industrial partners to participate in the development of new educational programs and organize internships and practical training for students.
