Peter Kühne

You’ve spent most of your career as an engineer at Bloomberg. What’s been your career path?

I started out as an intern in the first London intern cohort. A year earlier, my friend had done an internship at a bank and went on a tour of Bloomberg’s office. They told me how impressed they were with the company and shared that they needed software engineers. The interviewing process was very appealing — it was much simpler than having to take psychometric tests. I got a full-time offer and returned after completing my master’s degree in computer science. 

I went through the entry-level training program and joined Trading Systems in 2006. During my first six months on the job, I collaborated with an engineer in our New York office on a cash flow analysis application. At the time, this was challenging because videoconferencing wasn’t as common or as high-quality as it is today. I then worked in currency trading and position management. After a few years, I became a senior engineer and later a Team Lead. I then worked on regulatory reporting to the London Stock Exchange, loan and deposit tracking/ticketing, and position management. My team grew, and eventually I became manager for the whole group. 

What projects are you working on? 

Right now, I lead the Sell-Side Pre-Trade Engineering team, which is focused on connecting to new electronic trading venues around the globe, adding new financial instruments for trading, as well as new workflows and functionality to enable clients to do things they can’t do manually. We’re building out automated workflows, improving observability into our system, and building and setting up a new team in our Frankfurt Office. 

Tell us about the scale of what you’re working on, and its unique challenges.

All of the products in this group share one common technical challenge: latency. Enriching, processing, encoding, and delivering quotes and trades must happen in milliseconds for our clients to remain competitive. Our system processes thousands of quote changes each second, and it needs to be highly available and fault-tolerant as well, since clients may have legal requirements to deliver trades into the market.

The same is true for the Trade Negotiation popup component that my team owns. This system, which can display a trade alongside a plethora of additional information faster than a human can perceive on their own, manages over 150K of these negotiations a day.

How do you see yourself developing your career at Bloomberg over the long term?

I’ve been at Bloomberg for 15 years. Because we don’t have set career paths or job titles, you have a lot of opportunities to branch out and try new and different things. I’ve spent most of my time focused on trading solutions, and have pursued opportunities to work on products and applications with a potentially broader audience of users. I am also involved in a number of non-technical efforts, such as hiring, mentoring future leaders, and various working groups.

I also like to keep on top of new trends, new technologies, and the latest in the open source world to see how we can make the best use of them. I hope to continue building a strong Engineering team that maintains a focus on building things right, while balancing this against client needs.

What advice would you give to your younger self, just starting out in your career?

Don’t underestimate the value of your network. It is so crucial in all careers, but especially at Bloomberg. My grandmother used to say, “You always meet twice in life.” Building a good relationship now will pay off in the future.