The 2015 Tech 50: Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko
Chief Technology Officer & Global Head of Research and Development
Bloomberg
PNR

After retaking the helm of the financial information empire that he founded in 1981, Michael Bloomberg formed an executive committee consisting of himself; Peter Grauer, the company’s chairman since Bloomberg’s first run for New York City mayor, in 2001; and co-founder and longtime global head of financial products and services Thomas Secunda (No. 1 the past three years). It is to them that CTO Shawn Edwards and global head of R&D Vlad Kliatchko report. They are both 46-year-old, 12-year Bloomberg veterans who fit the mold of a collaborative, agile, open-plan-office culture and finish each other’s sentences, though in different accents. The Russian-born Kliatchko has mathematics and computer science degrees from St. Petersburg State University; as head of R&D since 2012, he oversees the bulk of Bloomberg’s 4,000-plus technologists, who are dispersed globally, including in a San Francisco space that opened in May. “Ability to find talent is the only constraint” to adding staff faster, Kliatchko says. Edwards, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and headed R&D before the CTO office was formed in 2008, runs smaller teams focused on “advanced, exciting, forward-looking opportunities,” lately on the analytics frontier in machine learning and natural language processing. Their division of labor is “a traditional CIO/CTO split,” Edwards explains, but is “highly fluid,” as are movements of people between their teams. “Technology leadership is part of the culture,” Kliatchko says, as it has been since Bloomberg invented early network protocols and other systems that couldn’t be bought off the shelf. Today the company — even as it prototypes keyboard designs with 3-D printers — blends in-house innovation with participation in such open-source communities as Linux, OpenStack and Solr. “That’s a big change in our profile the past several years,” says Edwards. Secunda calls Edwards and Kliatchko “great technologists” and stresses “they are leading a team of more than 4,000 great technologists who epitomize our culture of constant innovation.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”