The majority of software engineers working on the Telegram team are Ukrainians, – Financial Times reported

The majority of software engineers who write code for the Telegram messenger are Ukrainian citizens.

This information reported according to a report by Financial Times that cites the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov.

“Durov mentioned that the company has around 50 employees in total, including 30 rigorously vetted engineers. He said that he recruited his team by organizing programming competitions and then sought to identify the winners, adding that most of them were coders from Ukraine,” – the article states.

The staff at Telegram are described as “super young” individuals from Eastern Europe, earning half a million dollars a year and sharing photos of their Porsches on social media.

“There is virtually no turnover. They share the same values and believe in the company’s mission,” Durov stated earlier this year.

Media outlets have previously reported that Pavel Durov’s elder brother, Nikolai, is one of the principal developers and co-founders of the messenger. He reportedly has nearly the same access rights as Pavel, meaning Nikolai can manage the messenger independently of his brother. Nikolai has been portrayed in the West as a brilliant mathematician and programmer who became the “brain” behind the Russian applications VKontakte and Telegram.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been making continuous efforts to ban or impose strict control over Telegram.

Recently, it was announced that a new bill regulating Telegram would be introduced in the Verkhovna Rada by the end of September.