Meet the TLs: How three Bloomberg engineers approach being a team leader

There’s no one way to be a Team Leader (TL) in Bloomberg’s Engineering department. As a company seen by some as a technology company, by others as a media organization, and by others as a financial news organization, we have practically as many different products as the world has markets. If an Engineering TL wants to get their hands dirty coding, we can make that happen. Or if they dream of mentoring and shaping strategy on one of our flagship products, Bloomberg is also the place for that.

Whatever an Engineering TL envisions for their career, our goal is to help them bring that vision to life. There’s a reason Bloomberg employees choose to grow within the company, staying an average of 7.5+ years. As engineers are the backbone of what we do, Bloomberg works hard to cultivate an environment where both TLs and individual contributors can thrive.

Read on to hear from three of our Engineering TLs around the globe about the varied paths they took to get there, and how they’ve shaped their version of the role at Bloomberg.

The homegrown TL

Based in Bloomberg’s collegial San Francisco Engineering office, Alex Mutricy joined the company as an experienced engineer to serve as an individual contributor working on the team responsible for the firm’s private cloud environment. He immediately found himself drawn to Bloomberg’s relatively flat hierarchy and how he could have candid, cross-team conversations with senior engineers and stakeholders about his product. But, he wanted the opportunity to have even more ownership and influence over the work he was doing.

It wasn’t until he was tapped for Bloomberg’s internal TL training program and spent six months working with a mentor from another part of the company that Alex began to understand what a TL role could look like for him: “It’s an interesting mix of engineering and being a product manager for your product. There’s a lot of latitude for decision-making at the TL level, and I find that very interesting.”

Alex loved the idea of being able to shape strategy and be accountable for the product he was working on. Near the end of his training, an engineering TL role opened up on the BQuant Public Cloud Infrastructure team, which is also based in the SF office. He quickly jumped at the chance to try out his new skills working on this strategic, client-facing product.

Now that he’s been a TL for a while, Alex thrives on the way he’s constantly presented with new challenges and how he gets to mentor other members of his team. He especially appreciates that Bloomberg lacks the red tape he’s encountered elsewhere in his career, and sees himself “as the information filter for the rest of the team,” so that both they and their product can succeed. While he doesn’t code as much as he used to – his days are mostly taken up with meetings, ad hoc issues, code review, strategy work, and mentoring – he likes being able to drive change and have real impact. In his words, as an engineering TL at Bloomberg, “you can shape your destiny.”

The internal transfer TL

From the moment she joined Bloomberg as a new graduate from the University of St. Andrews, Londoner Eliza Jonauskyte was drawn to the company’s open, supportive culture, and the way she was encouraged to grow. She explains that, “Bloomberg has always been a great place for learning and asking questions.” Since it was this focus on people that drew her to the company, she knew early on that she wanted to be a leader in order to help continue it.

After several years honing her technical skills as an individual contributor working on the Bloomberg Transaction Cost Analysis (BTCA) product, Eliza prepared for leadership by heading up projects and mentoring an intern. Finally, her mentors felt she was ready to move up to a TL role. The only problem? Such a position wasn’t available on the BTCA team. So Eliza took the leap and transferred to one of the Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) Allocation Management engineering teams.

However, the AIM team was big, with more than 450 engineers working on the product, so her new team didn’t want to immediately throw Eliza into the deep end. She initially joined as a back-up for the existing engineering TL while they were transitioning to another team. This enabled her to get to know the product through tech development, while also building relationships with stakeholders and team members. As she explains it, “it was a series of small steps so that, by the time [my role] became official, it felt like nothing had changed.”

Eliza notes that the day-to-day role of an engineering TL varies from team to team. Because AIM is such a big product, she spends very little of her time coding. Instead, she focuses on design and project meetings, code reviews, finding technical solutions, and mentoring her team. She still loves Bloomberg’s collaborative culture and participates in both recruitment and Diversity & Inclusion initiatives, both of which she sees as key to her role as a leader in the company.

To Eliza, what’s exciting about being an engineering TL is how Bloomberg tailors “the role to the person, rather than having a pre-set notion of the role you’re going to fulfill. There’s this openness for you to grow, change, and move as your career progresses.”

The external hire TL

By the time Pedro Rubio joined Bloomberg’s New York office as a TL on the company’s Ticker Plant infrastructure, he already had decades of experience as an engineering lead in finance, at startups, and with major tech companies. This meant he knew just how challenging it could be to come in as an external TL on a crucial piece of infrastructure and be expected to get quick results.

To his surprise, he was essentially told not to worry about it. Instead, he was offered the space to succeed. As he explains it, “Bloomberg wants to create a learning environment where it’s okay to learn, it’s okay to go slow. This is a place that invests in its employees for the long term.”

In practice, Pedro was given months to ramp up and get to learn and understand the complex systems he was going to be working with, as well as to build relationships with his team so that he could be an effective leader. After years working at startups, he was blown away by Bloomberg’s thoughtful approach to cultivating its employees.

Nearly a year into his tenure with the firm, Pedro notes that he’s still being given space to learn and grow, even as he now takes on more responsibility for his systems, which sit at the core of Bloomberg’s market data infrastructure. It’s starting to sink in that this is just the experience of being an engineering TL at Bloomberg, and that the company will let him shape the role. As he explains: “There’s no one way to be an engineering manager or a team lead. You really get to decide how you want to be a leader

Having every intention of being at Bloomberg for the long haul, Pedro says, “My only regret is that I wish I had come here sooner.”