Paul Williams - Bio

Paul is a programmer, technical manager and part of the engineering leadership team at Bloomberg in London.

Image from Bloomberg

Paul co-founded the London Engineering Department at Bloomberg, and is part of the leadership team that has seen the local engineering group grow to over 900 developers over the last 25 years. He, his team, and peers designed and built core components of the Bloomberg Professional Service, aka the Bloomberg Terminal, including Launchpad, the multi-screen real-time financial data display, and Instant Bloomberg ("IB"), the finance industry's ubiquitous secure instant messaging system. His focus continues to be near-real-time dispay and data-processing systems, involving development and deep analysis of C++ frameworks and interactions with managed JavaScript environments.

He also works closely with the engineering and business teams in Bloomberg's New York office, and co-founded Bloomberg's Tech Hub in San Francisco, collaborating with West Coast architect IwamotoScott to design a workspace for software developers. Paul has recently formed new development teams in Hong Kong and Frankfurt. Read an interview about Paul's first 20 years at Bloomberg here.

Paul also is passionate about STEM initiatives in the UK and abroad, working with non-profits and educational establishments to help ensure that the next generation is excited about a future in technology. He also champions women in the tech workplace. Paul has been part of the judging panel for a number of Hackathons, including HackTrain, and TELhack at the Science Museum in London, where Paul and his wife are patrons. He has recently launched a scholarship at the University of Leicester with Galactic Unite, the education outreach team within Virgin Galactic.

He started programming in the 1980s on the first personal computers, teaching himself Computer Studies and rapidly discovering that publishing programs in computer magazines (such as this Basic Compiler - see C-Zap on page 16 of the PDF download) was far more lucrative than a teenage paper round. After studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Bath University and writing music sequencers for student union bar gigs, Paul flirted with the fledgling games industry in the 80s (Commodore 64 example) then worked for Caplin Cybernetics, a startup designing parallel processing accelerators for solving complex maths problems at high-speed in the fields of image processing, computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis. A focus on building fast, reliable, innovative systems then led to opportunities to work with Bloomberg, where Paul has spent the rest of his career.

Main experience in: Technical and team leadership, near-real-time systems design, high-performance software, C++ and Windows development, recruitment, public speaking, moving fast and not breaking things.

Bloomberg's Tech Hub in San Francisco

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