Meet the Team: Internal & Client Service Applications Engineering

The Internal & Client Service Applications (ICSA) Engineering group is responsible for creating the systems that Bloomberg uses to run the company. They interact with literally every department in the company. This group is an asset to both Bloomberg employees and Bloomberg clients via automation, self-service and workflow solutions. The group’s central mission is to help Bloomberg’s 25,000+ employees around the globe perform their duties to the best of their abilities by giving them the best tools with which to do their jobs, and to deliver the best client service experience to Bloomberg’s customers.

Examples of crucial business functionality that ICSA builds include: Customer Relationship Management tools for Bloomberg’s Sales department, data permission access, security infrastructure, supply chain systems, and solutions to optimize HR operations.

This group is focused on three areas: attracting and acquiring new customers, seamlessly onboarding them onto Bloomberg’s solutions, and providing ongoing support and assistance throughout their user journey.

First let’s meet Rakesh Menon, Head of ICSA Engineering. Rakesh’s role is to help align the technology strategy for each area in ICSA with the broader themes at Bloomberg and the industry at large.

Tell us about your role as head of the Internal & Client Service Apps (ICSA) Engineering group?
I aim to provide broader context to the team’s work and empower them to devise plans that are focused on value delivery. Most of my time is spent ensuring that the team’s work is aligned with company goals and that we are building high-performing teams.

What are some of the unique technical challenges your team needs to tackle?
Our software is used by 100% of our clients and employees. That requires us to solve a plethora of challenges that require different approaches, technical decisions, and to consider a variety of potential trade-offs when making choices about how to address them.

Our data and analytics entitlements framework requires us to build low latency, highly fault-tolerant systems so we can check if a client is allowed to access a particular dataset via our products.

Our Analytics Desk customer service system helps support reps answer client questions via Instant Bloomberg (IB) about our products quickly and accurately using an internal knowledge base. This includes routing questions to an appropriate human representative who is knowledgeable about the particular Bloomberg Terminal function the client is inquiring about — this is a complex distributed systems problem that can scale as the volume of questions increases.

Many of our teams support core business processes for the company, which has enabled us to invest in common repetitive workflows that allow us to orchestrate atomic process steps in order to make these multi-departmental tasks more efficient. We have recently started building solutions that enable our businesses to design an automation process from end-to-end that is powered by our pre-built API as building blocks.

Bloomberg runs on data. Our businesses use analytics to make informed decisions about their progress, as well as product decisions. Our Data Management & Analytics solution enables the business to develop self-service analysis on top of curated and secured datasets. Our technical journey here has been how to use a combination of open source and internal technologies to build a system that can ingest, transform, and store vast amounts of data (at a petabyte scale) to meet the ever-increasing demand for analytics in a cost-efficient and secure manner.

At the same time, we also use third-party systems to handle payroll and finance operations respectively. If there is something out there that does what we need, we’ll evaluate it and consider the trade-offs vs. building it ourselves.

Briefly tell us about your career path.
I started at Bloomberg in 2002, joining the training class of Engineering new hires. Prior to Bloomberg, I was in the middle of my second master’s degree at Syracuse University — with no immediate plans of joining the workforce. Instead, I had set my sights on staying in academia. Some of my friends at the time had joined Bloomberg, so I decided to take a chance as well — more than twenty years later, I’m still here!

After my training class ended, I joined the engineering group that managed tools for a wide variety of processes and systems used by employees across a number of groups (what was then called Internal Systems). We were a lot smaller back then, and our teams today reflect the investments the company made in our processes and tools as we grew and expanded as an organization.

From there I got an opportunity to be a technical lead on a very large project involving integrating an ERP system into Bloomberg’s order-to-cash process. I was one of the lead developers on the project that ran for close to three years. Looking back, I felt I packed a decade’s worth of learning into that project. I subsequently became the team’s Lead.

After a few years of leading that team, I got promoted to become an Engineering Manager for the entire engineering team responsible for our ERP system. Keep in mind, I had no real knowledge of the system and how it worked internally. The new role scared me — imposter syndrome was definitely at play. But I used my technical foundation to learn and grow.

In 2017, I got the opportunity to lead a new group, Sales Intelligence. I was familiar with the area, and more confident this time around. One of the first things I realized after talking to the teams and the business stakeholders was that the team structure at the time did not allow for the engineers to develop deep domain knowledge or to invest in longer-term technical bets, while being incremental. I also realized there were leaders in my org who were really capable of having much more impact. So I set out to re-structure my new team within six months of assuming the role in order to signal to our partners how we want to operate and where we want to invest.

In 2018, I was given the opportunity to lead the whole Internal Apps group. Leading teams through the pandemic was by far the most interesting challenge of my career. The challenges that the pandemic brought our company really stretched me and many others, especially in terms of leading teams through that period and providing them the support and clarity they needed to get through those times. It made me realize how important empathy is for a leader.

What skills do you look for when hiring engineers for your team?
When hiring for Bloomberg, I feel it is really important to be intentional about how we interview. A manager on my team put it perfectly; never disqualify a candidate based on their answer to a question that the interviewer themselves probably couldn’t answer a couple of years ago. The larger point is that we all evolve, learn, and grow in our careers. So it is really important to me that we look for the right things, ask questions, and, more importantly, listen to the answers in a manner that allows us to assess what perspective the candidate would bring to the team and whether the candidate seems like they will be able to learn, evolve, and grow. This approach also helps us hire from a broad talent pool and build inclusive teams. When hiring internally, the same principles apply, though the mechanics are different.

What are some of the areas that your team is focused on?
As a department, our main focus is on how we scale our offerings in a way that aligns with Bloomberg’s broader strategy. For example, enterprise product adoption is a key focus area for Bloomberg. In order to support these company goals, our internal processes to attract new business, sell to our customers, onboard them quickly, and bill them accurately must be able to scale. We have a complex offering of products, so our ability to meet our business goals in the next couple of years will depend very much on how we are able to keep up with our internal processes.

We are also investing in our workflow platforms with the goal of allowing Bloomberg departments to build, evolve, and improve their workflows in a manner that requires less engineering effort. We will achieve scale through this approach. I am very excited about the progress and investments we are making in our workflow platforms for Bloomberg.

Due to an increasing focus on Compliance and Data Governance from a regulatory perspective, we have started teams in London. I am very excited about this.

Finally, we are investing in our software maturity. Our goal is to move aggressively towards paved-path solutions for our engineering teams wherever possible. With the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and other new regulations approaching, we want to ensure we are doing the right thing, as well as ensuring that we are looking at the total cost of ownership of our engineering solutions.

How do you foster culture on your team?
The biggest fear I have is that someone on the team might feel they couldn’t speak up or say something that could have changed the course of a decision because they felt they would not be heard or there would be consequences. Fostering a culture of inclusivity means everyone has a chance to partake in team experiences and have an impact. I will be the first one to admit that there is always more work to be done here, but it is something about which I try to be very intentional.

I meet with as many people on my teams — in both structured and unstructured ways — in order to connect and build relationships with them.

I also believe that culture is formed through how we work together. Building high-performing teams that are empowered to solve problems is the best way to enable a lot of the behaviors that lead to collaboration and inclusiveness. Keeping an eye out for the health of the teams and helping them address issues through self reflection or by removing obstacles that prevent them from being successful helps maintain the right culture and the morale to go along with it. We measure this, in part, in a structured way via a benchmark assessment that teams take periodically. Managers only step in for things that teams cannot solve themselves or need additional guidance on.

“As a group, what is interesting and humbling is that 100% of users — both internally at Bloomberg and external clients – interact with ICSA’s solutions in some way, shape, or form.”

– Rakesh Menon

Natalya Buga is a tech lead on the Compliance Applications team. She’s been with Bloomberg for 23 years. She spearheads development of the Compliance Screening and Sanctions domains within Compliance Applications.

What are you working on now? What inspires you about it?
When I joined the Compliance Applications team, we had very few features available to our business partners. Since then, we’ve built efficient and robust applications that provide screening-as-a-service, allowing business users to set up new screening quickly and without much Engineering support. We are now working to further enhance business efficiency by providing solutions to digitize and, where possible, automate their workflows. We are using event-driven architecture, implementing interfaces to integrate with other systems, and building monitoring and reconciliation processes. Next, we will develop dashboards and search tools to provide even more flexibility and data-driven insights to our users and to ensure they are well positioned to react to ever-changing regulatory demands.

My personal interest lies in applying Design Thinking to our work and building systems that are not only useful and efficient for our users, but also are maintainable and engineer-friendly.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
Be it new business needs that require swift and efficient technical solutions, or the adoption of new technologies, or participating in Communities or Guilds and driving your own initiatives, it’s never dull here.

In my 23 years with Bloomberg, I’ve learned new skills, led projects, worked with a variety of business partners, mentored people, proposed and designed technical solutions to numerous problems, and led employee engagement initiatives in the Bloomberg Women’s Community. I now work on expanding our systems into new areas of the Compliance domain and co-lead external engagements within the Python Guild.

How does the collaborative environment at Bloomberg create opportunities to learn new skills and expand your expertise?
I often find myself thinking that we don’t need elevator pitches at Bloomberg. Most of the time, when I voice an idea, I get a green light to pursue it without much hassle.

I remember a few years back, after I had joined my current team and didn’t know much about Compliance yet, I thought it would be great to more closely collaborate with the business and figured we could start with having cross-domain summits to learn about each other’s goals and needs. I hadn’t seen this being done before, so I prepared a thorough proposal and a speech, but I didn’t get a chance to deliver it in full. As soon as I explained what I wanted, my manager agreed that it was a great idea and we should definitely do it.

I received equal backing when I decided we should do something to foster connections and belonging for women in our department. I started a series of casual get togethers, which inspired other people to join in and grew into a more active and developed local Women in Tech group.

When I joined the External Engagement Working Group of the Python Guild during the pandemic, I voiced my conviction that we should hold regular knowledge sharing sessions. Again, this was met with enthusiasm, but I was also offered help when the Guild leaders realized it was too much for me to handle alone. This went from something I did occasionally to something I now lead across Bloomberg’s entire Python community.

“I often find myself thinking that we don’t need elevator pitches at Bloomberg. Most of the time, when I voice an idea, I get a green light to pursue it without much hassle.”

– Natalya Buga

Richard Shipmon is the Team Lead for the Identity & Lifecycle Management Engineering team, which helps protect sensitive data and infrastructure that financial professionals use every day.

Tell us about what you’re working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
Our team works on two solutions that help Bloomberg stay ahead of security threats. One ensures that identities are properly used, activated, and deactivated throughout the user lifecycle. The second ensures that privileges and access to Bloomberg’s sensitive systems are reviewed when internal users’ roles and responsibilities change.

The breakneck pace of the security space combined with the excitement of my peers inspires me to be a better version of myself each day.

What is it like moving to different teams within Bloomberg? How have you adapted?
Every time I had the opportunity to change teams within Bloomberg, I was pushed far outside of my comfort zone. It was in these magical moments where I grew the most. The moves set off a chain of events where I learned new ways of thinking and expanded my network.

Bloomberg gives you a plethora of resources to navigate changing teams. These range from networking opportunities to a dedicated Internal Mobility team. So if you are thinking about making a change, take a risk and jump in head first!

What advice do you have for people from underrepresented groups who are pursuing a career in tech?
Show up as your authentic self, and use your unique traits as a superpower. You can leverage your uniqueness in your communication with peers, how you approach problems, and when stepping up to lead efforts.

What do you think a team must have to be effective and healthy?
At the root of every great team is trust and accountability. I believe it is critical to feel comfortable around your peers so that everyone can openly share ideas that push the boundaries of the status quo. When that’s the case, then accountability is no longer used to correct your peers when things are not going well. It simply becomes another way to help each other improve — and ultimately, to create innovative solutions.

“The breakneck pace of the security space combined with the excitement of my peers inspires me to be a better version of myself each day.”

– Richard Shipmon

Mike Liebman manages the Data Management, Metering and Analytics Platform (DMAP) team. He recently celebrated his 22nd anniversary at Bloomberg.

Tell us about what you’re working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
Our team has three main pillars, data management, data analytics, and metering, which are increasingly becoming intertwined. For data analytics, our mission is to provide everyone across the firm with the data and tools they need to make something better, whether it’s improving our customers’ experience with our products, improving efficiencies or profitability, reducing the company’s risk, or ensuring our resources are used most effectively. Our goal is to have a direct or indirect influence on every decision made at Bloomberg. This requires us to process thousands of files and billions of rows of data daily. We manage, secure, and provision petabytes of data, ensure the quality and timeliness of the data, model it efficiently for analytics, and allow analysts and data scientists to discover, understand, and action the data. We realize that the only way for us to continually scale is through self-service, and a lot of our energy has been spent building those platforms.

Our data management pillar is responsible for ensuring that the right data is available, in the right place, at the right time, and to the right people, in a secure and compliant way. This requires us to understand all of the data, both structured and unstructured, across the entire firm, how it’s used, who is responsible for it, and where it moves. This will allow us to automate policies, procedures, and standards — especially as it applies to regulatory requirements — ensure data quality, build out reference and master datasets, and empower the use of our data as a strategic internal asset.

The metering pillar is a recent addition to my team, with many overlaps with our data analytics and data management efforts. Our mission is to reimagine our enterprise metering product to allow for turnkey metering capabilities across a broader set of Bloomberg products.

What are some of the unique technical challenges your team tackles?
Almost every system in Bloomberg (and the world) is a transactional system. Transactions are typically small and fast, and designed for high performance and high data integrity. However, we’re working with analytics systems, designed to allow anyone to process and join massive amounts of data in a self-service manner. Creating an environment where millions of files, billions of records, and petabytes of data across thousands of unique datasets can be ingested, modeled for analytics or metering, secured, and made discoverable is a huge challenge. Standard Bloomberg infrastructure generally focuses on the transactional problems, so we needed to figure out how to scale the data needs of the organization through self-service capabilities.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
Before joining Bloomberg, I spent 15 years working on a variety of technologies across different industries, including consulting, healthcare, government, and retail. Working for a couple healthcare startups laid the foundation for keeping things interesting. I believe in constant innovation and treating most situations as a startup within an established company — we’ll prototype, iterate, establish and prove the need before asking for funding. For our team, it’s been the key to continuous growth in a very niche technology space.

Why is it important to you to help make your workplace more inclusive?
I am an active member and ally of all the Communities at Bloomberg. I’m most involved in the Bloomberg Abilities Community (B-ABLE), which focuses on mental health, neurodiversity, physical disabilities, and chronic medical conditions. Personally, I live with a dissociative disorder, complex PTSD, almost all of the anxiety disorders, and a degenerative spinal condition. I first started as the co-lead of the Princeton chapter of B-ABLE in 2018, and moved up to U.S. co-lead shortly thereafter. I also helped start our B-ABLE in Tech group at the end of 2022, and I’m now its Executive Sponsor. I’m really passionate about advancing talent with disabilities across the firm because it gives me a chance to change someone’s life in some way each and every day!

B-ABLE has had a direct role in making Bloomberg more inclusive through a variety of initiatives. This includes working to make our facilities more accessible, changing HR policies and procedures, and advocating for individual employees’ needs. We have helped simplify the discoverability of accommodations for all employees. We have paired with our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to raise awareness around mental health and increased the number of counselors available in our EAP program.

What’s it like working on a team that’s spread across multiple geographies? How do you find the different parts of the team work together?
Our team is spread across New York, Princeton, and London. With our alignment across offices, we offer opportunities for everyone to meet new team members, learn new skills, and make a wider impact. Plus, opportunities for internal mobility aren’t limited by location — and our people don’t have to uproot their lives to take on new challenges. As our product offerings are firm-wide, having representation in London provides more opportunities to raise awareness and continue with the “startup” mentality.

You’ve built a number of teams from scratch during your career at Bloomberg. What’s your secret sauce to successfully building a team and getting the team to gel?
I like to think of DMAP as a big, growing family. We try our best to celebrate each other frequently, create cross-team opportunities to work with others and grow, and have friendly competitions — whether it’s our daily step competitions or who can beat me in BOB hours (no one has yet)! Events are so much more impactful when you work them as a team of 100, rather than a small group of five.

“I’m really passionate about advancing talent with disabilities across the firm because it gives me a chance to change someone’s life in some way each and every day!”

– Mike Liebman

Amit Malani leads the SAP Integration team in ICSA, which provides workflow tools and establishes processes to manage engagement with Bloomberg clients.

Tell us about what you’re working on now and what your biggest challenge is. What inspires you most about it?
Our team’s streamlined tools and workflows make it easy for clients to order Bloomberg products and services — everything from the Bloomberg Terminal to enterprise solutions and data subscriptions. These systems handle every client engagement lifecycle event, including adding modules, relocating services, and converting products. We’re fully revamping our system to align with the company’s new commercialization model and future requirements. Being part of such an important initiative is both inspiring and demanding, and it has motivated us to deliver robust solutions that enable Bloomberg to operate at its highest level. We also supply customer master data to thousands of internal applications with speed, reliability, and resilience, so teams across the organization can tailor their software applications using accurate, up-to-date information.

How do you keep things interesting after so many years at the same company?
I get this question often — especially from friends and family — because staying with one company for this long is generally unheard of outside of Bloomberg. While I may have been at Bloomberg for 19 years, I have changed organizations and regions to take up new challenges, upskilling myself and learning from amazing people in each and every role. I started my career in Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) and then explored our Electronic Trade Order Management Solution (ETOMS), Tradebook, and Real-Time Market Data, where I also changed regions. With each move, I had the opportunity to learn a new domain, build new relationships, enhance my technical skills, grow my leadership skills, and solve big challenges along the way. I cannot emphasize enough how working with the smartest, motivated, and compassionate people has shaped me as a person.

How do you foster a collaborative, inclusive environment at work?
I firmly believe in creating an environment where everyone can voice their ideas, regardless of their experience or expertise. That openness leads to stronger outcomes, because it uncovers possibilities and mitigates risks that might otherwise go unnoticed.

How do you inspire teams to innovate? What are some examples of recent innovations?
The best way to inspire a team to innovate is to establish a vision and let the team figure out a way to get there. There might be some trial and error along the way, and we may not deliver on the vision right away, but exploration, independent execution, and learning is important in the long run. As a leader, recognizing people’s efforts and contributions is crucial.

“The best way to inspire a team to innovate is to establish a vision and let the team figure out a way to get there. There might be some trial and error along the way, and we may not deliver on the vision right away, but exploration, independent execution, and learning is important in the long run.”

– Amit Malani