Bernard Bernstein
Tech Leader
Greater Boston
Overview
Work Experience
VP Principal Engineer
2022 - Current
Joined American Express in the acquisition of BodesWell.
American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. provides financial and travel related services for consumers and companies.
Co-Founder & CTO
2019 - 2022
Acquired by American Express in June 2022. BodesWell removes the stress and doubt surrounding big financial decisions. By combining personal financial data, economic models of the future, and an incredibly simple interface, we take away the overwhelming aspects of financial planning so you can build the life you want. BodesWell was a remote company founded in 2019 by Matthew Bellows and Bernie Bernstein. Launched pilot with American Express in 2021 with title My Financial Plan.
Chief Technology Officer
2017 - 2018
Shifted culture from ad-hoc projects delivered for stakeholders to one of a shared responsibility between stakeholders and development teams. Introduced a weekly rhythm of technical and product reviews and metrics-focused reporting. Longer-term planning used OKR's with scrutiny and goals assigned to all work. Management shifted toward an Alliance model, empowering individuals to take ownership and be responsible for execution and delivery of results, with consideration toward career goals. My organization included around 50 individuals responsible for: - Production infrastructure and support (hosted on Rackspace, transitioning to AWS) - Development platforms - Product management - Engineering - Technical finances (budgeting, capex, procurement) - IT including Desktop Support for 16 global offices
VP of Engineering
2011 - 2017
The bulk of my time at TripAdvisor focused primarily on Hotel-facing B2B products. Handing off the Vacation Rentals team to a new organization in 2012, began recruiting engineers to build the Hotelier products and Analytics organization to help inform Sales and Marketing areas about performance of the products and to help guide their targeting efforts. My organization included four development teams consisting of 35 engineers with responsibility for: - Owner Experience - Hotel Solutions - Payments - Sales Applications - Brand Partnerships
Sr Director of Engineering
2008 - 2011
Initially hired to create and launch flights search on TripAdvisor consumer site. Started in September, began by recruiting a team of engineers from within the company and hiring from outside. Completed initial beta in Nov 2008 (two months) and launched publicly in Feb 2009. Server-side components developed in PHP on Linux servers performing real-time queries to multiple data sources, aggregating results and delivering to the front-end application running on the browser in JavaScript using JQuery. The small team of six agile developers (three remote) moved quickly to create each level of the application with very tight integration. As the flights product stabilized and we moved toward improving interface and launching in more international markets, we began to expand the scope of the organization and created a Vacation Rentals (VR) product based on a recent acquisition of a company that aggregated these properties. In 2009, created and led a second organization to focus on this new effort, growing the org to 12 engineers developing Flights and Vacation Rentals products. In 2010, we began a new B2B organization called TripAdvisor for Business (T4B). Handed off the Flights team to the team manager, and took the remaining engineers to focus on Vacation Rentals and then begin to build a Hotel-focused B2B product called Business Listings. By the end of 2010, we had 11 engineers working on Vacation Rentals and Business Listings in my organization.
TripConnect is an online service that allows people to get travel advice from people they know.
Raised $1,000,000.00 from Masthead Venture Partners.
Co-founder / VP / Chief Scientist
1996 - 2008
Served as senior software engineer, community, and information architect with an ongoing role as engineering lead. Managed small groups of engineers to build highly scalable platforms as well as custom projects. Acted as lead engineer and provided technical assistance in most engineering projects. Assisted in coding many of the projects and took leadership role in any project that needed a champion to see it completion. Filled formal management positions at various times, leading groups from six to ten engineers. Assisted in corporate planning and marketing, including perspectives on corporate marketing campaigns. Contributed in numerous sales calls and provided assistance with sales staff to help detail engineering capabilities and costs for services rendered when customization becomes necessary. Participated in analyst calls while pitching for corporate investment. We began trading on Nasdaq in July, 1999 as Talk City, Inc., and continues to trade as LiveWorld (LVWD).
Senior Engineer/Scientist
1994 - 1996
Acted as developer and scientist charged with finding interesting new ideas for Apple’s online service, eWorld. Worked in a small lab in Boulder, Colorado given freedom from much of the day-to-day projects of the main office in California. Developed avatar chat that can work through low-bandwidth connections (dial-up). This used a two-dimensional space where chat output appeared in “balloons” over the heads of each character in the chat. Created a text-to-speech module for eWorld that allowed users to listen to chat while doing other tasks such as reading email. This involved choosing voice attributes for each user and associating each user with a “position” in space (using stereo panning). As the Web began to grow in popularity, we developed an http/IRC/ftp/nntp version of eWorld as a prototype to demonstrate a direction we could go to transition off proprietary dial-up lines to a more “open” Internet model.
Apple is a corporation that designs, manufactures, and markets consumer electronics, personal computers, and software.
Raised $1,170,230,000.00 from KB Securities, Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft.