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The 2017 Tech 40: Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko

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


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
1. Adena Friedman
NASDAQ
2. Catherine Bessant
Bank of
America Corp.
3. Robert Goldstein
BlackRock
4. Jeffrey Sprecher
Intercontinental Exchange
5. Lance Uggla
IHS Markit
6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko
Bloomberg
7. David Craig
Thomson Reuters
8. Michael Spencer
NEX Group
9. Don Callahan
Citigroup
10. Elisha Wiesel
Goldman Sachs Group
11. Michael Bodson
Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
12. Terrence Duffy
CME Group
13. Charles Li
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
14. Sean Belka
Fidelity Investments
15. Chris Concannon
CBOE Holdings
16. Guy Chiarello
First Data Corp.
17. Steven Lieblich
Citadel
18. David Rutter
R3CEV
19. Blythe Masters
Digital Asset Holdings
20. Alfred Spector
Two Sigma Investments
21. Neil Katz
D.E. Shaw Group
22. Lee Olesky
Tradeweb Markets
23. Richard McVey
MarketAxess Holdings
24. David Gledhill
DBS Bank
25. Seth Merrin
Liquidnet Holdings
26. Antoine Shagoury
State Street Corp.
27. Peter Brown &
Robert Mercer
Renaissance Technologies
28. Lou Eccleston
TMX Group
29. Peter Cherecwich
Northern Trust Corp.
30. Mike Chinn
S&P Global Market Intelligence
31. Chris Corrado
London Stock Exchange Group
32. Neal Pawar
AQR Capital Management
33. Gary Norcross
Fidelity National Information Services
34. Steven O'Hanlon
Numerix
35. Sebastián Ceria
Axioma
36. Brian Conlon
First Derivatives and Kx Systems
37. Tyler Kim
MaplesFS
38. Michael Cooper
BT Radianz
39. Robert Schifellite
Broadridge Financial Solutions
40. Jim Minnick
eVestment

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