Hello, Codeforces!

Zlobober and I are glad to invite you to compete in Nebius Welcome Round (Div. 1 + Div. 2) that will start on Mar/12/2023 17:35 (Moscow time). The round will be rated for everyone and will feature 8 problems that you will have 2 hours to solve.

I feel really thrilled and excited about this round as this is the first time I put so much effort in a Codeforces contest since I quit being a round coordinator in December 2016 (wow, that was so long ago)!

We conduct this round to have some fun and we also hope to find some great candidates to join Nebius team. Solving 5+ problems in our round will be a good result and will count as one of the coding interviews. Apart from that top 25 contestants and 25 random contestants placed 26-200 will receive a branded Nebius t-shirt!

Some information about Nebius. I have joined this new start-up in cloud technologies in November as a head of Compute & Network Services. It's an international spin-off of Yandex cloud business with offices in Amsterdam, Belgrade and Tel Aviv. We offer strategic partnerships to leading companies around the world, empowering them to create their own local cloud hyperscaler platforms and become trustworthy providers of cloud services and technologies in their own regions.

We know that competitive programming makes great engineers. It boosts your algorithms and coding skills, teaches you to write a working and efficient code. We aim to hire a lot of backend software engineers for all parts of our cloud technology stack that ranges from hypervisor and network to data warehouse and machine learning.

Here you can check Nebius website and open positions. If you feel interested in joining Nebius as a full-time employee, go on and fill the form.

Special thanks go to:

• MikeMirzayanov for his outstanding, glorious, terrific (you can't say enough, really) platforms Codeforces and Polygon

• 74TrAkToR and KAN for this round coordination (and for rounds coordination in general, good job lads!)

• ch_egor for his help with one of the problem that has a peculiar setting which we will discuss a lot in the editorial

Fingers crossed all will be well, you will enjoy the round and we will be back with a new one in several months!