Andrey Lopatin (Russian: Андре́й Серге́евич Лопа́тин) is a Russian programmer, one of the main founders of VKontakte social network and Telegram messenger, two times world champion in competitive programming, 2009 Topcoder Open winner, coach of the SPBU competitive programming team since 2006.
As a student, together with his friends Nikolay Durov and Oleg Eterevsky, Lopatin hacked into the network of ICPC organizers and sent messages to all participants, which led to disqualification of the team.
[2][4] They were coached by Natalya Voyakovskaya, Senior Lecturer at the SPBU Faculty of Information Technology and Programming.
[8] Lopatin began working on the Telegram protocol in 2012[5] and became head of the company's Russian legal entity, but was fired by Pavel Durov in October 2014.
[13] After Voyakovskaya retired, Lopatin took over as coach of the SPBU competitive programming team[5] and lead it to XI place at ICPC in 2008.