Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Bloomberg grew while others cut – and that’s the retention strategy. Doubling from 5,000 to 10,000 engineers while competitors downsized sends a clear signal: we won’t discard you when markets turn.
- Two titles, zero hierarchy: engineers and people leaders – that’s it.
- The flat structure works (at the right career stage). Ownership and cross-team mobility work well early and mid-career, but rapid senior progression is slower going.
In an industry defined by churn, Bloomberg has built a strong employee-retention culture – while still trying to keep engineers challenged enough to stay.
The company is known for its core product, the Bloomberg Terminal. This device and its software provides real-time financial data, analytics, news, and communication tools to the world’s banks, hedge funds, governments, traders, and asset managers.
Behind Bloomberg Terminal is the company’s engineering division, which focuses on reliability, scale, and maintaining systems that need to operate continuously during periods of market volatility. Engineers work on distributed systems, real-time data infrastructure, and large internal platforms, often within an environment that prioritizes consistency over rapid experimentation.
The engineering culture at Bloomberg reflects that emphasis on stability. Bloomberg has developed a reputation for long employee tenure, relatively predictable work-life balance, and a more structured operating environment which outshines many venture-backed technology companies. Glassdoor reviews consistently highlight the company’s stability, collaborative culture, and strong retention.
However, that stability can create a different kind of challenge. Across Glassdoor reviews, one of the more common criticisms is not burnout or chaos, but a feeling among some engineers that the work can become predictable over time.
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Lean in and invest
While some organizations have rushed to reposition themselves as AI-native, contributing to the layoff surge, Bloomberg has taken a more cautious, measured approach.
Bloomberg is not shrinking amid the AI layoff wave. In fact, it is growing steadily, viewing the market disruption as an opportunity to invest in its people.
“While we’ve grown year-on-year, we’ve done so thoughtfully,” Colin Steele, global head of HR for Bloomberg Engineering tells LeadDev. “While some other tech firms did mass hiring a few years ago, they got to a point where they didn’t need all that talent and had to downsize. Should we need to pivot or change focus, we always look for ways to move our talent around the organization to fill open needs.”.
Bloomberg’s engineering department has essentially doubled in the last decade – growing from around 5,000 engineers to nearly 10,000 today.
“When the market gets tough, it’s time to lean in and invest,” says Paul Williams, head of Terminal experience at Bloomberg. “Even during the pandemic, while others were cutting staff, we were hiring and have continued to hire.”
Not smaller, just flatter
At Bloomberg, the secret sauce to developer retention is tied to its long-standing flat structure and a philosophy that prioritizes scope and ownership over title progression. The culture emphasizes a core message: what you build and own matters more than your level number.
“To invoke Mr. Bloomberg’s name, part of his philosophy is that we don’t have titles,” says Becky Plummer, software engineer manager. “The purpose for that is because we want to make sure we’re getting the best product done.”
In his autobiography Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg explains that, when he founded the company, he intentionally avoided traditional corporate titles like vice president because he believes they create unnecessary hierarchy and distract employees from performance.
He argues that titles encourage turf battles, status-seeking, and bureaucracy. Instead, he wants a flat organization where authority comes from merit, contribution, and results rather than rank. The goal is to promote open communication, speed, and accountability
To date, Bloomberg’s engineering side of the company has only two titles: engineers and people leaders, which fall into the categories of team leaders and managers. This is because Bloomberg aims to minimize bureaucracy and avoid unnecessary approval chains, ensuring a more level playing field, Plummer says. Williams echoes this sentiment. “Your position in the org chart does not define your impact,” he says.
Bloomberg’s relatively flat structure also enables people to reach out to others regardless of their position in the organization. In turn, this gives managers like Williams the opportunity to build close working relationships and a strong understanding of each individual, allowing them to tailor their approach and bring out the best in people both individually and as part of a team.
Williams says he enjoys being part of a company where you can help mentor and develop people, create products customers truly need, and still remain deeply involved in the technical.
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Keeping everyone happy?
Bloomberg employees often speak positively about its culture, but some who have left point to a more nuanced limitation. While the company is considered a strong environment for junior and mid-level engineers, there are those that feel it offers fewer pathways for growth beyond senior level and into more advanced career stages.
In a Reddit discussion, a contributor described their experience of working at Bloomberg in fairly nuanced terms. They say they would recommend it as a workplace “without hesitation,” but they wouldn’t endorse it for mid-career engineer seeking rapid progression and top compensation.
Another commenter spoke similarly, suggesting the company is especially well-suited to the early and mid stages of a career, but less so for those aiming to progress into more senior roles.
Bloomberg’s flatter structure is frequently referenced as a reason why senior progression can feel slower compared with more aggressively leveled companies.
However, both Pummer and Williams say the flat structure reflects different roles and responsibilities and allows engineers to move between projects, helping them build skills and stay challenged.
Plummer explains that sometimes managers assign an engineer to work across multiple teams rather than focusing on one specific product. When there’s a broader problem affecting several teams, a manager may ask an engineer to prioritize solving that larger, cross-team.
“They can develop additional skills through doing that kind of work,” Plummer says. There are always opportunities for engineers to get stuck into larger projects, she adds.
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Turning small ideas into meaningful innovations
Williams describes how, early in his time at Bloomberg, he was given a stretch assignment to help modernize the Bloomberg Terminal, despite not yet having the necessary skills. With permission to experiment, he explored new ideas and built a prototype that allowed users to drag data views across the desktop. A product manager noticed the concept, shared it with senior leaders, and the idea eventually evolved into Launchpad, a key feature of the product.
For Williams, the experience showed how being trusted to experiment can turn small ideas into meaningful innovations.
This approach creates a strong sense of ownership for engineers, Plummer says. “Our product teams or our engineering teams focused on a product are fully owning the whole thing – ‘soup to nuts’; like from the initial intake of the idea and refining that idea with the product.”
She explains that a manager may oversee the process from initial responsibility through to building the product, deploying it into production, and deciding how clients will access it, particularly for incremental releases.
Engineers have full ownership of their work, including diagnosing and resolving issues when things go wrong. This is both a blessing and a very strong sense of responsibility, Plummer adds
For Bloomberg, the key to developer retention is a combination of factors: not following the layoff frenzy trend and enabling ownership over employee title progression.
