The 2017 Tech 40: Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko

Peter Vasiliev

July 27, 2017

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6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko, Chief Technology Officer & Global Head of Engineering, Bloomberg

< The 2017 Tech 40

6. Shawn Edwards &

Vlad Kliatchko

Chief Technology Officer & Global Head of Engineering

Bloomberg

Last year: 5

If there is a shortage of computer scientists and engineers, it isn't preventing Bloomberg from bringing them in by the hundreds. The number overseen by Vlad Kliatchko, global head of engineering, is approaching 5,000 in 11 countries, and growing by double-digit percentages each year. And those scientists and engineers work regularly with chief technology officer Shawn Edwards' group of fewer than 100, researching emerging technologies for an organization that for years has explored machine learning and natural-language-processing systems. "This is a culture with an endless ability to generate creative new business ideas, resulting in an infinite number of projects to work on," says Kliatchko, 48, who's been with Bloomberg for 14 years. The company, led by founder and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, attracts talent in part because "our engineers can come in and have a direct impact," Kliatchko says. "They are very connected to the business and to customers," taking on the network's challenges of global reach, speed, and scale: There are 325,000 Bloomberg Professional terminals and daily volumes of some 100 billion market-data messages, 400 million email messages, and 17 million chats.

Since Edwards became chief technology officer in 2008, Bloomberg has become an active participant in the open-source community, with a noticeable acceleration in the past few years. In a paper presented at the 2016 Very Large Data Bases Conference in New Delhi, India, Bloomberg signaled that it would be open-sourcing and inviting "more open collaboration" on Comdb2, its primary database system, which has been under continuous development since 2004. Edwards, also 48, who has been at Bloomberg for 14 years after stints with Bear, Stearns & Co. and IBM, has forged academic relationships and is executive sponsor of a data science grant program. "We are big believers in an approach that combines human curation and machine intelligence," he explains. "A lot of human knowledge goes into filtering out noise." Edwards also sponsors and advocates for the Data for Good Exchange conference, which explores ways to apply data science in the public and nonprofit sectors and is now in its fourth year.

The 2017 Tech 40