EPAM Brand Guidelines: Effective Programming for America, Founded in 1993

Two classmates and an acronym.

EPAM began with two school classmates. Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedia say the company was founded in 1993 by Arkadiy Dobkin and Leonid (Leo) Lozner; German Wikipedia places Dobkin in Princeton, New Jersey, and Lozner in Minsk, Belarus, and Belarusian Wikipedia adds that Dobkin had moved to the United States in 1991. The first offices were in the United States and Belarus.

The name is an acronym. According to German, Russian and Belarusian Wikipedia, EPAM stood for “Effective Programming for America”; German Wikipedia notes that the company now uses only the four letters in its marketing and information material. The American and Belarusian businesses were brought together as EPAM Systems on 18 December 2002, German Wikipedia says.

Expansion in Central and Eastern Europe followed. In 2004 EPAM merged with Fathom Technology, a Budapest software developer; the Hungarian technology site HWSW reported in 2025 that Fathom then had 160 developers, while EPAM had about 600 employees across the United States, Russia and Belarus. In September 2006, Russian Wikipedia says, EPAM bought VDI, a developer with delivery centres in Russia, creating a combined company of about 2,200 people. A North American office opened in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and a European centre in Budapest, Ukrainian Wikipedia says; the headquarters is now in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

A New York listing and a design practice.

EPAM listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker EPAM, in February 2012, according to Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedia; German Wikipedia dates the listing to January that year. Russian Wikipedia says analysts judged the offering a weak one at the time, and that experts put this down to difficult markets, particularly in Europe, rather than to the business itself.

Much of its later growth came through acquisitions that pulled it towards consulting and design. Russian Wikipedia lists Thoughtcorp of Canada and Empathy Lab, a digital-strategy and customer-experience firm, in 2012; Jointech of China and GGA Software Services in 2014; NavigationArts, a digital consulting and design firm, and Alliance Global Services in 2015; and, in 2018, Continuum, an American design consultancy, and TH_NK, a British digital agency. Belarusian Wikipedia says Continuum became EPAM Continuum, the company’s business consulting, experience and technology service, launched in 2019.

EPAM has also built products of its own. Ukrainian and Belarusian Wikipedia describe InfoNgen, a text and sentiment analysis platform that uses machine learning to study information from multilingual websites, and TelescopeAI, an artificial-intelligence platform for IT operations and workforce management, both dated to 2018; Belarusian Wikipedia says TelescopeAI won a Big Innovation Award from the Business Intelligence Group in 2019. Ukrainian Wikipedia adds EPAM SolutionsHub, a library of software products, accelerators and open-source tools, and an Open Source Contributor Index that rates commercial companies’ contributions to open-source projects.

Recognition in the financial world followed. German Wikipedia says EPAM appeared on Fortune’s list of fastest-growing companies in 2019, 2020 and 2021, entered the Forbes Global 2000 in May 2021 and joined the S&P 500 index in December 2021; Belarusian Wikipedia gives the date as 14 December 2021.

Training is part of the brand. German Wikipedia describes a university programme started in 2004 to give students in Central and Eastern Europe specialist IT training; Ukrainian Wikipedia calls the training centre EPAM Campus, also known as EPAM University, and says it offers more than thirty IT courses.

How IT services firms present themselves.

IT services and consulting firms sell work that is hard to photograph: software, systems, advice and the people who deliver them. Their identities therefore lean on a small set of tools. Wordmarks are usually set in a confident sans-serif, often in capitals or as a short set of initials, and palettes tend to sit in blues and purples, from deep navy to bright violet, used across websites, reports and event stands.

Their websites follow a familiar structure. Industry pages address banks, insurers, retailers, manufacturers and public bodies one by one, while capability pages cover cloud, data, cybersecurity, AI and consulting. Client case studies carry much of the proof, usually naming the customer and describing a programme of work rather than a product, and many firms publish their own research reports, surveys and indices to show expertise and to be quoted in the business press.

Place matters too. Delivery centres and offices are often photographed as campuses, with landscaped grounds, glass buildings and training halls, and those images recur across annual reports, recruitment material and news coverage. Careers pages speak directly to graduates and early-career engineers, with training programmes, campus recruitment and employee stories, alongside pages for experienced hires and alumni.

The last layer is public commitment. Sustainability reports, community programmes, education initiatives and sponsorships of sport and culture give the brand a presence beyond the client meeting, and in the case of sponsorship can put a company name on a stadium, a team shirt or a city race. The guides that follow look at how each firm uses those tools, and where its own history shows through.

A 2022 exit and a new chief executive.

The year 2022 brought a major change. On 4 March 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, EPAM announced that it would stop serving clients in Russia, according to a letter from Arkadiy Dobkin to staff quoted by the St Petersburg business paper Delovoy Peterburg in April 2022. After about four weeks of review the company decided to end all of its operations in Russia, in stages over the following three months, and offered staff relocation to other countries. The paper listed Russian offices in cities including St Petersburg, Moscow, Samara and Krasnodar. Ukrainian Wikipedia says the company also set up a fund to support people in Ukraine, where it has offices in cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Dnipro. HWSW wrote in 2025 that the company had since stabilised and employed more than 61,000 people in over 55 countries.

Leadership changed hands in 2025. HWSW reported in May 2025 that Balazs Fejes, the founder of Fathom and later EPAM’s president of global business, would take over as chief executive after 31 years under Dobkin; German Wikipedia records the handover on 1 September 2025, with Dobkin becoming executive chairman. In August 2026, CNA reported, citing Reuters, the activist investor Engine Capital, which held a 1.5 per cent stake, urged the board either to buy back shares aggressively or to explore a sale of the company.

For a design guide, EPAM shows how an engineering company can turn an acronym into a brand and build a design practice through acquisitions. Compare Globant, another engineering-led digital services firm, and Capgemini. For this guide we use a graphite, a cyan and a soft grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep EPAM’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.