Eric Vander Weele: Building Bloomberg LP

Since graduating from U-M, Eric N. Vander Weele (BSE CS ’08, MS CSE ’10), has helped grow Bloomberg’s technology division and increased efficiency and production for employees and clients.

Vander Weele attended U-M from 2004 to 2008 and obtained a BSE in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. Instead of continuing on in industry during the economic downturn, Eric immediately applied to U-M’s graduate program to continue his studies. He conducted research under former CSE Chair Farnam Jahanian and former CSE Prof. Michael Bailey in computer security and distributed systems. Eric completed his MSE in Computer Science in 2010.

In May of 2010, Eric began his career with Bloomberg LP – a global finance, media, and tech company headquartered in New York City. Bloomberg’s primary product, the Bloomberg Professional service (aka the Bloomberg Terminal), is a platform for clients to monitor and analyze real-time financial data, search financial news, and obtain price quotes for public and private markets globally.

From 2010 to 2014, Eric developed a real-time data processing framework, which allowed developers to easily manipulate market data through a series of transformations for visual representation in the form of grids and charts. This framework was such a success that it is now integrated within the Bloomberg Terminal and is being utilized in all new projects by other teams within the company.

Due to Eric’s accomplishments (and a bit of luck), Eric and another colleague relocated out to San Francisco to open Bloomberg’s west coast technology hub in 2014. During the first year, Eric was directly involved with architects and other operational groups within Bloomberg in making decisions on the build out of the new office. Before an official office was present, they were working out of a temporary co-working space and actively recruiting & hiring local talent. The office officially opened in May of 2015.

Since moving into the new office, Eric now leads a team and promotes ‘InnerSource’ for building out an enterprise Python environment for production quality infrastructure and applications. Currently he focuses on how to reuse and integrate existing C/C++ libraries within Python, how to improve productivity for other developers, and how to manage and monitor the deployment of Python applications. Many of Bloomberg’s ~5,000 developers in Engineering utilize Python, ranging from simple scripts to complicated services & applications.

Throughout Eric’s career, he has led Bloomberg’s full-time and intern recruiting efforts at Michigan from 2010 to 2015. In addition to remaining actively involved recruiting from Michigan, he is also engaged in recruiting from top west-coast universities, such as Stanford and Berkeley. Eric’s ongoing challenge of recruiting is how to effectively communicate that Bloomberg is a technology company to students. This is one of Bloomberg’s biggest challenges in attracting top talent. When Eric first became involved, the average number of full-time hires and interns from Michigan was a handful. Now, the average is up in the high teens to twenties. From 2010 to 2017, he and his recruiting team have been involved in over 85 full-time and internship hires.

Now, Eric continues to push the boundaries of Python within Bloomberg while continuing to nurture his relationship with the University of Michigan, his alma mater, for attracting students to, in his opinion, one of the best technology companies to work for.