A brief share of my experience living in Innopolis, a new city in Russia focused on people from IT careers.
So I'm from Bolivia, and I lived in Russia for five years. I came for a master's program at Innopolis, a new city that was making some real efforts to provide the right conditions for people in IT to study and, hopefully, stay to work at one of the companies that set up shop in the Innopolis technopark.
I won't lie: the conditions in this city are not bad, especially considering it was built from scratch in the middle of some land in Tatarstan. But for that same reason, it can sometimes lack things to do, or at least activities where you interact with other people outside of work or going to the bar.
A city built from scratch
The name says it all: Innopolis, from innovation + the Greek polis, "city." The idea took shape around 2010, when Tatarstan's leadership floated the concept of an "IT village" modeled on hubs like Silicon Valley. The foundation stone was laid on June 9, 2012, in a ceremony led by then Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alongside Tatarstan's president, Rustam Minnikhanov, who buried a time capsule with a message for future residents. The city got its town status in December 2014 and was officially opened on June 9, 2015 — which makes it, still today, one of the youngest cities in Russia.
It sits about 40 km from Kazan, the Tatarstan capital, up on windswept hills above the Sviyaga River. The master plan was drawn up by the Singaporean architect Liu Thai Ker (sometimes written Louis Tai Ker), the same planner behind a lot of modern Singapore, which is why the whole place feels so deliberate — wide boulevards, everything within a two-minute walk, buildings that honestly look a bit like spaceships.
Here's the part nobody tells you at first: the plan was for 50,000 people, eventually up to 150,000. The reality, ten years in, is far more modest. Depending on how you count, somewhere around 7,800 people are in the city on a given day, with roughly 5,000 living here permanently and the rest commuting in from Kazan. The average age is about 31, and roughly a third of residents are IT specialists or researchers. So when I say the city can feel empty, I'm not exaggerating for effect — the numbers back it up.
Who actually runs the place
For a city this small, the mayor's office has seen a surprising amount of turnover, and I found the lineage kind of fun to trace:
Ruslan Shagaleev - Innopolis
- Egor Ivanov — the first mayor ("mayor 1.0"), chosen at the end of 2014. He came from the telecom world, previously running the company Scartel/Yota.
- Ruslan Shagaleev — "mayor 2.0," from 2016. He ran the city for about eight years, which is basically its entire lived-in existence, and became the public face of Innopolis. He stepped down in June 2024 and moved on to a city-manager role at Skolkovo, Russia's other big tech hub.
- Dmitry Vandyukov — "mayor 3.0," from June 2024. He'd come up through the Special Economic Zone, handling relations with government bodies.
And here's the freshest twist: at the end of 2025, Vandyukov was tapped to run Innopolis University itself, and Ildar Khuzzyatov, the head of the city's executive committee, took over as acting mayor pending new elections. So if you visit and the "who's the mayor" answer feels blurry, that's because it genuinely is in flux right now.
One thing worth knowing about how the city is governed: a lot of it runs through Telegram. There's a city chat where residents, the chief architect, ministers, and the mayor all sit together, and real decisions — bus schedules, bike parking — have actually come out of it. It's a small enough place that this works.
The university at the center
Everything here orbits Innopolis University, established in December 2012, with its first bachelor's cohort in 2014. In the early years it leaned heavily on Western partners — the founding academic model was built together with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the National University of Singapore, and the whole point was that you could get a CMU-caliber IT education without leaving Tatarstan. Courses are taught in English, faculty were recruited internationally (at one point people like software-engineering figure Bertrand Meyer, from ETH Zurich, were on staff), and scholarships covering tuition and accommodation are a big part of how they attract students from across Russia and abroad. The current rector is Alexander Gasnikov.
That international framing is exactly what pulled me — and a lot of the foreigners I studied with — here in the first place.
How I actually got in
I should back up and explain how a junior analyst from Bolivia ended up with a spot here at all, because it wasn't an obvious path.
Back home, the selection ran through ALAR (the Asociación Latinoamericano-Rusa), an organization that connects Latin American students with Russian universities. The process was short but real: an English test, and then an interview with Dr. Alberto Sillitti, an Italian full professor from Innopolis's computer science faculty, who sat me down and asked me questions about software engineering. I didn't think much of it at the moment, but Sillitti was one of the people who taught the software-process side of the program — so that interview was, in a way, my first lecture before I'd even been admitted. At the time I was working at Cofar as an analyst — very much in my early, green junior days — so I was answering those questions half from what I'd studied and half from the little I'd managed to pick up on the job.
It worked out. On July 12, 2017, ALAR sent the official word that seven of us from the region had won 100% scholarships to Innopolis University. I still have that letter. Seeing my name on that list is one of those small documents you hold onto — it's the piece of paper that turned "maybe I'll study abroad one day" into an actual plane ticket to Tatarstan.
But getting the scholarship and actually arriving turned out to be two different things. I landed about two weeks into the semester — I'd been stuck in Bolivia sorting out documents before I could travel — so I showed up already behind, exhausted, and jetlagged from a very long trip. My very first class, the next morning, was formal methods. Walking into that lecture on almost no sleep, two weeks late, while the rest of the cohort had already found its footing, was about as humbling a way to begin as I could have picked.
How the programs actually work
The degree I did was the MSIT-SE — Master of Science in Information Technology, Software Engineering — and it's worth being precise about what that actually is, because it surprised me too. It was built directly on Carnegie Mellon's software engineering master's, taught in English by CMU-certified instructors, and it runs about a year across three semesters. Importantly, it is not a "learn to code" program. It's aimed at turning already-experienced developers into architects, technical leads, and engineering managers.
The structure had two clear halves. The first half was the theory-heavy core: software engineering proper, formal methods, and a lot of material centered on software processes. Formal methods was taught by Néstor Cataño, a Colombian professor whose work is all about automated reasoning and formal verification; with him we learned to specify and reason about systems rigorously using Event-B, a formalism for modeling software mathematically before a line of code ever gets written. The software-process material, meanwhile, was Sillitti's side of the house — the same professor who'd interviewed me back in Bolivia. The second half shifted toward the management side — software development management and process maturity models, the whole discipline of how an organization matures the way it builds software — and this is also where the elective courses opened up.
The electives were where it got fun for me. Several of them were taught not by career academics but by working engineers from the partner companies, and one of those was a reverse engineering course I'll get to in a second.
Not everything that stuck with me was about code, though. One of the people who left the biggest impression was Angelo Messina — Professor Emeritus at Innopolis and an Italian with a long career in defense software engineering, who these days works with the Defence & Security Software Engineers Association. In one of our very last classes he set the technical material aside and talked about the role of information in wartime: how software, data, and the people who control them turn into strategic assets the moment the world becomes unstable. After a program built almost entirely around building things, it was a sober, memorable note to end on — a reminder that the systems we were being trained to build never really exist in a vacuum.
The whole program then culminates in an industrial project with one of Innopolis's partner companies, where you take everything from both halves and point it at a real problem. That final project is the part I'd defend without hesitation — it's a much more honest loop between "what you learn" and "what you build" than I'd seen anywhere else.
My industrial project: disaster recovery with Acronis
My project (2017–2018) was with Acronis, and it ended up being the highlight of the whole degree.
First, a word on why Acronis was even there. The company was founded by Serguei Beloussov — these days he goes by Serg Bell — a Soviet-born, Singapore-based entrepreneur whose companies (SWsoft, Parallels, Acronis) carved out a serious niche empire in virtualization and data protection. Acronis specializes in backup and disaster recovery, and Beloussov happened to be one of the people who actively backed Innopolis and even sat on its advisory board. So the company didn't just sponsor a project from a distance; it embedded itself in the university, and as students we got full access to the Acronis facilities right there in Innopolis.
Our team of Innopolis peers dug into disaster recovery and a concept the company was pushing at the time called data resilience — essentially, how do you keep systems and data alive and recoverable when something goes catastrophically wrong, and how do you get a machine back on its feet as fast as possible after a failure? We spent a lot of time testing different recovery approaches on virtual machines, and a big chunk of the work went into the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) in Windows, probing whether its snapshotting could be leaned on as a serious disaster-recovery mechanism.
This is where it got genuinely hands-on. To understand how these systems behaved under the hood, we worked with the IDA disassembler, pulling binaries and applications apart to see what they were really doing at a level the documentation never tells you. And to prepare us for that, Acronis ran electives on the Windows kernel, drivers, and reverse engineering — taught by Alexey Kostyushko, the lead developer of Acronis's kernel team and, on several projects, a product owner for the students too. Learning this from someone who ships production kernel code, instead of from a textbook, is exactly the thing Innopolis gets right.
One point from those classes stuck with me. Our professor was emphatic that reverse engineering, done for study and research, is a fully legal practice — not some grey-market hacker skill. And he was basically right: in most jurisdictions it's the purpose that decides. Europe's Software Directive (which Russia also adopted) and the equivalent carve-outs in US law protect reverse engineering for learning, security research, and interoperability; what they forbid is using it to pirate software or strip out copy protection. Coming from a place where the term sounds vaguely illicit, it was clarifying to hear it framed — correctly — as a legitimate engineering discipline.
We wrote up our findings in a paper for the university, and then came the part I still tell people about: we took it to Acronis's Moscow office and presented it to Nikolay Grebennikov, a senior R&D leader there who had come from Kaspersky Lab, where he'd run research and development. It landed really well. Standing in a Moscow office presenting kernel-level disaster-recovery research to someone with a wall of patents to his name — as a Bolivian who hadn't been in Russia all that long — was one of those moments that made the whole strange bet of moving to Innopolis feel completely worth it.
The language thing nobody warns you about
As a foreigner with almost no Russian, coming to Innopolis can be frustrating in a very specific way. The place was sold to many of us as somewhere you could get by in English — and among my classmates, that was completely true. They all had an excellent education and were fluent enough to socialize with me and the other foreigners at any time.
The problem is everyone else. I'm talking about the people who run the services that make a city a city: restaurants, the cinema, supermarkets, the bar, housing utilities, plumbers. Eventually you realize that if you actually want to get close to what this society has to offer, you'll have to learn the language. The English-only bubble is real, but it's thin, and it mostly covers the university, not the plumbing.
The good and the bad, for students especially
Since I mostly know this place through student eyes, let me try to be fair and put both sides down.
The good:
- The economics are hard to argue with. Scholarships can cover tuition and housing, and even paid rent here is cheap — an apartment that costs a certain amount in Innopolis would run you 50% more in Kazan and several times more in Moscow.
- It's safe, quiet, and frictionless. Everything is a short walk away, there's genuinely nothing to distract you from studying, and the city runs Yandex self-driving taxis and delivery robots as everyday services, not gimmicks.
- The industry pipeline is real. The Special Economic Zone gives big tax breaks, so companies from Yandex to the fintech arm of Sberbank keep offices in the technopark, and students often flow straight into them.
The bad:
- The isolation is the flip side of the "nothing to distract you." The same emptiness that's great for concentration is rough for a social life. Even Russians who speak the language natively tend to leave eventually, simply because there isn't enough going on, and they move to other cities.
- Brain drain hangs over the whole project. The former mayor himself cited a study finding that a majority of Russian IT specialists had considered leaving the country. Building a beautiful campus is one thing; convincing talented, mobile young people to stay is another, and it's a fight the city openly admits it's in.
- There's a quieter democratic wrinkle too: because most people here rent, they aren't counted as permanent residents and can't vote in local elections. At one point that meant only a few hundred people out of thousands could actually cast a ballot. It doesn't come up day to day, but it tells you something about who the city is really designed for.
People I knew were already leaving
The brain-drain part wasn't an abstraction to me. Two of the people I knew in Innopolis were Stas and Sasha Litvinov — Stas was a teaching assistant and advisor during my classes, and he'd been part of the place since before the city officially existed, including a stint in Pittsburgh on the university's joint program with Carnegie Mellon. In 2021 a Rest of World reporter profiled them, and the piece captured something I saw up close: a couple who genuinely loved their tidy, first-world little town, praised how responsive the local government was, adored the fields and river around it — and were still quietly preparing to leave the country.
Fighting brain drain and creeping authoritarianism in Russia’s techno-utopian village - Rest of World
Facing a dire shortage of qualified tech workers, companies and the Kremlin are vying to win the hearts and minds of Russia’s entrepreneurs and engineers.
restofworld.org
Their reasons had to do with Russia's broader political direction rather than anything about the city itself, and I'll keep this part factual and let the reporting speak for the specifics: by the time I knew them, they were, in that telling, getting their pets documented so the whole family could go at a moment's notice. Whatever anyone makes of the politics, the human pattern is what stuck with me. Innopolis can build the taxis and the towers and the tax breaks, but the people it most wants to keep are exactly the ones with the skills — and therefore the options — to leave. I watched good people quietly run that calculation in real time. Eventually, in my own way and for my own reasons, I ran it too.
Staying to work: my years at Portavita
Here's the bet the whole city is built on: that graduates won't just study here, they'll stay and work. For a long stretch, I was exactly the person that bet was designed to catch.
Part of that wasn't even optional — the scholarship came with a contract, and graduates were expected to work for a company in Russia for at least a year after finishing. But the way I actually landed my job was almost gentle: the university runs job fairs where companies come and pitch opportunities directly to students, and that's where I found Portavita.
Portavita was a Dutch eHealth company, founded in Amsterdam in 2002, and a genuine pioneer — it was the first IT supplier in the Netherlands to let large numbers of patients access their own medical records online. Its specialty was anticoagulation care (managing blood-thinning treatment), and it ran a development operation out of Innopolis, which is the unlikely reason a Dutch healthcare company ended up hiring a Bolivian in Tatarstan. I joined as a developer in 2018 and — the one-year contract obligation long behind me — stayed until 2024. I have zero regrets about that. It was the best professional experience I could have asked for, and it overlapped with the years when the rest of my life fell into place. It was during this stretch that I met my wife — on Tinder, as it happens. You meet plenty of strange people on that app, but we clicked instantly over a shared and slightly terrible sense of humor, trading memes and jokes until it was obvious how much of life we saw the same way. She was a local, and she gave me something the university bubble never could: Kazan, seen through a resident's eyes. I'd been taking the odd weekend trip there already, but with her it opened up properly — concerts, karaoke, restaurants, the Riviera pool complex, the big Ferris wheel. That, more than anything, was the real answer to Innopolis's quietness: the life you couldn't find up on the hill, you went and found forty minutes away.
Fittingly for this story, she had her own exit planned — a move to Saint Petersburg, chasing bigger opportunities — right around when we met. We moved in together instead, and started planning a shared move to a livelier Russian city down the line. (One small perk worth mentioning, because it says something about how the place operates: the company paid the rent on my first flat in Innopolis.)
The work was substantial. I led the Patient Assistant service, which supported patients on anticoagulation treatment across Dutch healthcare institutions; it launched in 2018 and grew to process thousands of patient records a month. We eventually split it into three microservices handling data processing, enrichment, and delivery through FHIR-compliant REST APIs (FHIR being the international standard for exchanging health data). Later I worked on the DVZA services platform (2020–2024), which processed millions of patient records while staying compliant with MedMij — the Dutch national standard for patient health-data exchange — and FHIR. Under the hood it was a proper backend playground: Scala and Akka (including Akka HTTP), Slick over PostgreSQL with Citus, and Kafka / Kafka Streams for messaging, with React on the front end.
And then the ground shifted. Portavita had been acquired in 2021 by CompuGroup Medical (CGM), a large German healthcare-software group. Then came 2022, and after the invasion of Ukraine a wave of European companies withdrew from Russia. Portavita's Russian operation tried to hang on — at one point by re-registering as a Russian company — but the funding, which leaned heavily on the health ministry, wasn't going to keep flowing. The writing slowly appeared on the wall. I left Russia in October 2023, and in 2024 I moved to Santiago, Chile, where I'm writing this from now.
Final thoughts
The idea of building a city around an industry, in a specific region, isn't new. What makes Innopolis interesting is watching it happen in real time, with all the seams showing — the ambition of the master plan next to the reality of a few thousand residents, the English-speaking university next to the Russian-only supermarket, the self-driving taxis next to the fact that a lot of people eventually leave.
I know that last part firsthand, because I became one of them. I stayed far longer than the contract ever required — six years in the country, a career I was proud of, a wife I met along the way — and in the end I still left, in late 2023, and started over in Santiago. That's not a knock on the place. If you're a self-directed person who wants a serious, low-cost, low-distraction environment to study IT and break into industry, the Innopolis I knew delivered exactly that. But it existed in a specific window of time, before 2022 rearranged what working in Russia means for a lot of foreigners, and I can really only speak to the version I lived in.
So, no tidy verdict. Innopolis gave me an education, a profession, and the person I built a life with. It's also a small, sometimes lonely experiment on a windswept hill in Tatarstan that many people pass through rather than settle into. Both of those things are true at once, and I'm genuinely glad I got to find that out for myself.
If you've studied or worked somewhere built around a single industry — a company town, a tech hub, a university city — I'd love to hear how your experience compared. Drop a comment below.
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