EPAM does not plan to abandon hiring juniors due to the development of artificial intelligence. On the contrary, the company continues to scale its own system of training young specialists: in 2025, more than 650 juniors joined EPAM production projects, and in 2026 the company plans to train and hire 600–700 beginners.
EPAM does not plan to abandon hiring juniors due to the development of artificial intelligence. On the contrary, the company continues to scale its own system of training young specialists: in 2025, more than 650 juniors joined EPAM production projects, and in 2026 the company plans to train and hire 600–700 beginners.
This was stated by Vice President and Head of EPAM Ukraine Stepan Mytish in an interview with LIGA.net.
“I strongly disagree with the idea that juniors will no longer be needed because of AI — they just need to be trained differently,” he said.
According to him, the company is betting on young specialists, because without a constant influx of new personnel, there will be a shortage of experienced engineers in a few years.
"If there are no juniors today, there will be no seniors in five to seven years," explained Mytish.
The main channel for training young specialists in the company is EPAM Campus. In 2025, more than 650 juniors joined the company's production projects after training. In 2026, EPAM plans to train and hire another 600–700 beginners. The company also indicates these figures in the EPAM Campus program.
The model assumes that the company does not simply compete for ready-made specialists on the market, but independently forms a personnel reserve. “We do not want to simply compete for people or hunt them, but strive to cultivate new specialists,” said the head of EPAM Ukraine.
At the same time, the requirements for beginners have changed. While fundamental knowledge and cloud technologies — Azure, AWS, and GCP — were previously an important part of the training, now they are being supplemented by working with modern AI models.
According to Mitish, juniors will need to learn how to work with frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Despite the active use of AI in development, EPAM does not plan to replace basic technical training with the ability to correctly write requests to chatbots.
A novice specialist, says Mytish, must understand what exactly he is doing, be able to check the result of AI's work, and be responsible for the final decision.
That is why, according to Mytish, the importance of not only programming skills, but also the ability to understand the subject area and work with business queries is growing.
EPAM's need for juniors is not just about current hiring. The company sees them as the foundation of future senior teams.
"Demographics do not improve during war, so we may face a shortage of personnel if nothing is done systematically. That is why we are investing in youth today so that in five years there will be no shortage of specialists," said Mytish.
