WHO WILL WORK FOR US STARTUPS?

The Foundation accepted the applications from September 25 to October 22. 43 candidates applied and the authors of 19 applications went through to the second round. The Expert Board selected the best of the best upon the personal interviews with applicants were carried out. After that, the representatives of concerned American startups also interviewed the candidates: thus the five winners were chosen. All of them will receive an educational grant from the Foundation that covers flights, accommodation, meals and internship in a startup.

— The winners of the competition are all with a high level of proficiency in programming, web development or database design. Each of the five is “claimed” by two American startups — Amplifylive, Hexa, Vimchat, 11sight, Powr among them. With some of them we have previously worked. Now all together we will choose the startup for each winner, then will sign the contract and tackle visa issues. I hope that an internship for Kazakhstanis will begin in early spring, told Ilzira Aldagarova, Program Manager of the Foundation.

The American side has confirmed the high level of Kazakh IT specialists during the first competition for IT internships that took place in 2016.

“We worked with Yessenov Foundation starting in 2016 when looking for high quality developers that would be a good fit for our startup. We hired Abay Nusipbekov as an intern, and he came to the Bay Area for several months, where we saw his performance improve drastically. It was a great experience for everyone, and we ended up hiring Abay full-time, as he now runs our engineering department. This is the second year we are participating in the Yessenov Foundation program and were extremely impressed by the quality of the candidates – we would hire them all if we could. Several candidates had the exact engineering skills that we were looking for, and all had great personalities that would be a great fit for any startup”, Brian Canty CEO/Co-Founder, AmplifyLive said.

Let’s tell few words about the winners. Dauren Malayev originally from Semey, he is a graduate of a bachelor degree and current PhD student in Kazakh-British technical University, candidate of science and head of the IT Department of a major Kazakh tourism online resource. Islam Madeniyat, from Balkhash, graduated from Suleyman Demirel University, works as a developer of Android applications in a company. Olzhas Aitbekov, Sergey Tyan and Arai Sabyrzhanare all Almaty residents and graduates of the International University of Information Technologies. Olzhas is a front-end developer in online shopping service, while Sergey is a full-stack developer in online informational-legal system for lawyers and Arai worked as an engineer-programmer at Kazakh National Agrarian University.

We will remind, the Shakhmardan Yessenov Foundation carried out the first competition “Internships in IT startups in USA” in 2016, the last of five winners of it returned home last July. It is worth to notice that three winners of that competition continue to work remotely for US startups from Kazakhstan, and another one continues to work in the Valley. Despite the fact that the number of applications in new competition has decreased, their quality has increased significantly. The applicants have submitted more extensive portfolio, the references submitted look more powerful, the list of this year applicant’s achievements in academic, social and volunteer activities also expanded.