Fred Phillips

Data Delivery & Data Test Automation

As the Engineering Manager overseeing the Data Platform and Data Test Automation teams at BenchSci, I drive the organization towards the forefront of DataOps, DevOps, automated testing, and efficient data delivery.

Data Platform Team Leadership:

• Established the Data Platform team in 2022, strategically assembling a distributed team of skilled software and data engineers.
• Expanded the team's mandate to take ownership of BenchSci's DataOps, significantly enhancing the data delivery process.
• Facilitated a twofold increase in data deployment frequency by enhancing automation, improving test coverage, and optimizing company-wide data pipelines.
• Currently spearheading the development of a cutting-edge platform, enabling BenchSci to harness the latest advancements in AI for delivering unparalleled value to clients.

Data Test Automation Team Contributions:

• Took over leadership of the Data Test Automation team in January 2024, playing a pivotal role in ensuring the organization meets its stringent data quality objectives.
• Embedded experts within teams to provide guidance and implement testing best practices, bolstering data quality across the organization.

Leadership and Team Development:

• Fostered a culture of excellence, enabling team members to achieve professional milestones through coaching and mentorship.
• Successfully mentored high-performing individuals, guiding them to promotions and leadership roles, while also assisting underperforming team members through performance improvement plans and candid conversations.
• Aligned. individual career goals with company outcomes, fostering a collaborative and results-driven environment.

News Automation Infrastructure

Led an agile team of four engineers in constructing Bloomberg's automated news platform, utilized by a team of content engineers to automatically generate news stories. Developed the product in coordination with multiple stakeholders, striking a balance between introducing new features for clients and enhancing the developer experience for content engineers. The platform was a real-time distributed system built with a combination of Python 3 and TypeScript, running hundreds of different types of automated stories triggered by market-moving events and collecting data from over one hundred data sources and APIs.

Experienced as a hiring manager for both senior and junior candidates, have conducted hundreds of interviews for different roles across the company. Specialized in interviews of candidates from diverse backgrounds outside of Computer Science.

News Automation Infrastructure

Joined the News Automation team as a senior software engineer and led the technical direction of the team. Designed and developed the team's priority queuing system based on RabbitMQ, the story aggregation system to link similar automated stories, and many other projects.

Planned the Python 2 to 3 migration of all news automation code. A 18-month project across multiple teams to migrate over 1.5 million lines of Python 2 to Python 3 without service disruption. Communicated the importance of the project with stakeholders to get it initially prioritized and to keep them engaged and informed throughout.

Coached and mentored junior members of the team, training them to lead on projects design sustainable systems.

Managed multiple clusters of Linux machines in Bloomberg's datacentres to run the team's applications, including budgeting for and provisioning hardware.

Commodities

Maintained numerical models in production to predict power and gas supply and demand across Europe implemented in Python. Worked with counterparts in the product team to take their models and run them reliably in production. Built infrastructure and tooling for the models to publish their results in realtime to clients through the Bloomberg Professional Service and directly to Excel.

Wrote and maintained real time pricing engines built in C++ to publish commodity prices to clients. Pioneered migrating these from legacy big-iron systems to commodity Linux hardware.