How is recruitment at ABBYY departments at MIPT

This year, the ABBYY department at the Faculty of Innovation and High Technology (FIVT) of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology turned 12 years old. During this time, we have trained more than 240 qualified IT specialists, almost a hundred of whom work in the company. Our developers create unique technologies for intelligent information processing, which are used by more than 50 million users in more than 200 countries. Keeping the tradition, in April we conducted a set of students for the next, 2019 year. Today we will talk about how we are looking for talented guys, what we teach them and why they want to work in our company.



ABBYY employs talented people with innovative thinking and extraordinary abilities. They are engaged in complex, interesting and ambitious tasks that no one has solved before them. Our goal is to find the same talented guys and develop their abilities. That is why 12 years ago we opened the Department of Image Recognition and Text Processing (RIOT) at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and 7 years ago we opened the Department of Computer Linguistics (CL). Our departments at MIPT help to prepare specialists in promising and sought-after areas: machine learning and analysis of texts in natural language. During training, we pay attention not only to theory, but also to practical tasks, development and application of technologies in business. More than half of graduates become employees of the company.

The training system at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology is designed so that in the first courses, students undergo fundamental university training, and in the senior ones they are distributed in the basic departments and are actively involved in the practical activities of academic institutes, such as the research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the R&D centers of large companies. Every year, dozens of applicants enter the departments of RIOT and KL .

In 2015, according to the results of entrance examinations, 30 out of 80 students were enrolled in the basic ABBYY departments. In 2016, 37 out of 90 students accepted the departments, and in 2017 - 37 out of 110 students. This year we assume that the number of enrolled students may exceed 40, as some guys asked me to let them get interviewed later. Although we do not exclude that in the end we will recruit only 30, but the most motivated students.

We accept students from the third year of study - first to undergraduate, and then to graduate. Previously, the guys write a motivation letter where they talk about themselves, their skills, why they want to study at ABBYY departments, what projects they have already done and what they would like to do after graduation.

How does recruitment go

Recruitment is carried out at the end of the second course. Students gather in a large in-class audience at MIPT. Traditionally, the head of the group of educational projects Andrei Ocheretny talks about the company, technological challenges, prospects for the development of the markets in which we work, as well as where the graduates of the departments work, about their relevance in the global labor market, and, of course, about the training program and student research papers.

Then students are given a test paper with 10-14 tasks, the solution of which is given an hour and a half.



Every year, our developers come up with new problems for students with non-trivial conditions, so that it would be interesting to solve them, and the answers could not be found on the Internet. Here are a few tasks from the control of this year. Can you solve these?)

1). Maxim and the puzzle

Maxim thought that alone to assemble the puzzle is not interesting, and brought it to work. He gathered his fellow programmers and poured the details onto the table. We decided to collect in turn. The first programmer posted one part, the second two, the third three, and so on: each next laid out one more detail. It is known that on the second round was posted a total of 100 parts more than on the first. How many programmers assembled the puzzle?

2). How to programmer Dima to give his beard a new look

One bearded programmer Dima sometimes gives his beard a new look. One day he thought, and in how many ways can he comb his beard correctly, that is, so that not a single pair of “beards” (see hair - hair) intersects. After a little thought, he built a model of his beard so that each “beard” had a pair of integer coordinates and one of the predefined directions. For example, a beard with dimensions 7 * 5 with three available directions may look like this:

In this case, the "beards" do not intersect, as intended. Namely, in each row, “beards” can only go counterclockwise from the previous “beard” or remain in the same position. And in each column, on the contrary, each "beard" leaves the previous one only clockwise or remains in the same position. Help Dima make an algorithm for determining the number of regular beards, if the beard dimensions (X * Y) and the number of directions (N) for each “beard” are given.

After the control, students communicate with our programmers. This interview lasts about 30 minutes. Our employee checks the student’s solutions, knowledge and erudition of the student, and also asks him additional questions to check the level of knowledge of programming languages, knowledge of the theory of algorithms and the ability to use various data structures to solve specific problems.



Then begins the interview with our HR specialists. For many students, this is the first interview in their life. The guys tell us what interests them and what they want to do. HR draws attention to the things traditional for such conversations and, naturally, asks provocative questions: for example, why, choosing from several basic departments (1C, Yandex, Sberbank, Cognitive Technologies), the student decided to enter the ABBYY department. We understand that IT is a very important industry and one of the drivers of the country's economy along with the production of raw materials. The success of the industry depends on the availability of personnel, therefore, on the one hand, companies are already competing for junior students, and on the other hand, market players are joining together to grow the future of IT in Russia.


Then we summarize the points for solving problems, take into account the notes made at the interviews, and make a list of children accepted for the department.

About ABBYY Chairs

Classmates often study at our department: together, in their friendly and familiar team, it is easier for them to solve complex problems. About which courses they read in KL are described in more detail here , at RIOT - here .

Both ABBYY departments are located on the company's premises. Here the guys study and participate in internships and projects of the company in order to gain the experience necessary for further work. This is also convenient for our employees who teach: they do not need to spend time on the way from the institute to work and back.

Theory + Practice

Already during their studies, students under the guidance of our specialists carry out unusual and difficult projects within the framework of ABBYY Labs. This gives the children the opportunity to solve the practical problems facing the developers of the company, to develop programming skills and the ability to work in a team already in the learning process.

• For example, in 2014, one of the student groups developed the MathHero mobile application, which recognized mathematical equations from photographs and produced their solutions. To create the project, the guys used ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine for Windows technology. We talked more about this project in this article .
• Another team in 2016 examined modern open-source structured data visualization solutions. The children chose the trilogy of Jules Verne’s novels “Children of Captain Grant”, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Mysterious Island” to visualize textual information in natural language using ABBYY Compreno technology . Their goal was to show that the task of analyzing and visualizing a large amount of unstructured text data is no longer overwhelming. We already told more about the project in Habré, and the results can be found in Russian and English on this beautiful site julesvernetrilogy.com .
• In 2017, students of the Department of RIOT, Masha Sandrikova, Alexey Zhuravlev and Andrey Sautin won the Russian final of the international technology competition Microsoft Imagine Cup with their project Meet Articles . This is a service for visualizing information on scientific articles, which, using the ABBYY Compreno technology, greatly simplifies the search for sources and scientists working in the selected field. Last July, the guys represented Russia at the international final of the competition in Seattle.

And then what?

Thanks to active practice, it is easier for students to understand what they want to do in the future, and feel like part of our company. That is why, already during the training, the guys start working at ABBYY. After graduation, they come to the technology department, as well as product teams FineReader, DataCapture, SDK, Cloud, Mobile and others.

By the way, these departments have interesting vacancies. Ask any questions and join our team!

All ABBYY vacancies can be viewed on this page .

Elizaveta Titarenko, editor of the corporate blog ABBYY