SoftServe Ukraine continues to hire juniors even against the backdrop of a general market trend where companies are increasingly doing without junior specialists due to increased productivity thanks to AI.
SoftServe Ukraine continues to hire juniors even against the backdrop of a general market trend where companies are increasingly doing without junior specialists due to increased productivity thanks to AI.
This was told by the head of SoftServe Ukraine, Anastasia Frolova, in an interview with LIGA.net.
«We continue to hire juniors, even when it has ceased to be mainstream, as they say,» says Frolova. According to her, the company has hired more than 120 juniors this year.
Frolova explains this approach as a long-term strategy: the company systematically sees an outflow of talented young people from Ukraine, who studied first in the conditions of covid, and then in a full-scale war. «Investing in education is a strategy for our presence and business development in Ukraine, which is also socially responsible,» she adds.
According to Frolova, AI does not eliminate the need for junior specialists, but it changes the expectations from them. «Any AI project assumes that a person remains in the process: someone has to configure the tools, take into account the context and risks, make decisions and be responsible for them. Therefore, the need for juniors will not disappear, but they will be expected to have a deeper understanding of how to work with code,» she explains.
At the same time, Anastasia noted, beginners often master AI tools more organically than more experienced colleagues, as they are already growing up in an environment where working with AI is the norm, not a new skill to adapt to.
Regarding the thesis of SoftServe founder Taras Kytsmey that AI increases productivity by 30–50%, Frolova clarifies: this difference does not automatically translate into the company’s profit. «Our projects that require AI expertise are not limited to AI specialists. Therefore, the use of AI — which, by the way, also has to be paid for — does not automatically give a 50% margin,» she says. Also, the expert adds, the pricing format itself in the service business is changing: the company is moving away from calculating man-hours in favor of consulting and complex solutions.
Meanwhile, the SoftServe team is not growing. The largest number of SoftServe employees — 13,000 people — fell at the beginning of 2022, after a record hiring in 2021. By the end of 2022, the number of employees in Ukraine had decreased to 12,700, although some Ukrainian specialists were relocated to other hubs of the company — Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the USA, Germany. The company passed the 10,000 employee mark already in 2026, but, according to Frolova, the war was not among the key factors in this reduction.
Despite this, since the full-scale invasion began, Anastasia says, SoftServe has not lost a single project due to war-related reasons. About 50% of new clients, she says, still come partly or fully from Ukraine — despite the company’s focus on globalization.
