Java & Spring engineering
Works hands-on with Java 8+, Spring Boot, Spring Batch and Spring Integration, with JBoss WildFly and MongoDB. This is the core stack behind the backend services he leads at Aer Lingus.
Dublin
Bernard Smith
Engineering Leader · Java, Spring Boot, Cloud & AI
Modernising mission-critical systems and building the teams that deliver them.
- Yrs in engineering, from 1989
- 30+yrs
- Yrs at Aer Lingus, from Nov 2017
- 9yrs
- Team at its largest, AWS migration
- 16
- Core stack since the 2000s
- Java & Spring
Worked with
Aer Lingus
Accenture
- Future Finance Loan CorporationFuture Finance Loan Corporation
Xiam Technologies / Qualcomm
WeDo Technologies
- MobileAwareMobileAware
- IONA TechnologiesIONA Technologies
Mail.com
Dialogic Corporation
Hamamatsu Photonics Systems
How I lead
Java and Spring, modernisation, and delivery practice
Application modernisation & AWS
At Aer Lingus he created and led a self-contained team of up to 16 people, covering every part of the software lifecycle, to migrate legacy on-premise IBM broker services to AWS. It was a large-scale, multi-year programme.
Integration & APIs
Delivers integration and APIs with IBM MQ, IBM Integration Bus, AWS SNS/SQS and REST. At Aer Lingus this included a messaging bridge from on-premise IBM MQ to AWS SNS/SQS on serverless containers.
Design authority
He reviews solution designs and acts as design authority on the work his teams deliver, bringing technical depth in Java, integration and cloud to the decisions that shape a solution.
CI/CD & quality
Uses Jenkins CI/CD with SonarQube code-quality gates across Git, GitLab and Bitbucket. He has also introduced continuous integration to teams he has led.
AI-assisted engineering
At Aer Lingus he took part in an AI working group looking at tooling for development and test teams, and advocated for the adoption of Cursor, GitHub Copilot and CodeRabbit.
Selected work
Outcomes you can point to
01 · Aer Lingus · Ground Star Inform Realtime
Delivered on time and under budget.
Dublin Airport ground operations, from paper to mobile
Bernard is the team lead for the software lifecycle of the backend services that integrate with Ground Star Inform Realtime. That work has been instrumental in moving Ground Operations at Dublin Airport from a paper-based process to a mobile application.
02 · Aer Lingus · Multi-year programme
Delivered on schedule.
Legacy IBM broker services, moved to AWS
He created and led a self-contained team of up to 16 people, covering every part of the software lifecycle, to migrate legacy on-premise IBM broker services to AWS. It was a large-scale, multi-year programme.
03 · Aer Lingus · Serverless containers
On-premise messaging connected to cloud services.
An IBM MQ bridge into AWS
He was team lead for a messaging bridge from on-premise IBM MQ to AWS SNS/SQS, implemented with AWS serverless containers, so cloud services could connect to core on-premise systems.
04 · Aer Lingus · OAuth2 · Apple Pay · Google Pay
MFA and digital payments, led as team lead.
Payments and identity for Aer Club
Bernard has also been team lead for enabling multi-factor authentication via OAuth2 for Aer Club members, and for enabling payments with Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Recommendations
What colleagues say
From LinkedIn recommendations
“excellent analytical approach… extremely rigorous… a very wide bank of expertise… will be an asset to any engineering organisation”
Andrew Pegum
Director of Software Development at Mastercard (managed Bernard at Xiam)
“Even in a C-Level position Bernard likes to get hands dirty with code”
José Alberto Suárez López
CTO & Co-Founder at Vizlegal (reported to Bernard at Future Finance)
“a mentor, coach and friend”
Brian McCabe
Principal Product Manager
Career
Career timeline
November 2017 — Present
Dublin, Ireland
Aer Lingus
Team Lead, Technology
Team lead in the Aer Lingus Technology Division. Current focus is the backend services for Ground Star Inform Realtime. Earlier, he created and led the team that migrated legacy IBM broker services to AWS. Other work includes the IBM MQ to AWS SNS/SQS bridge, OAuth2 multi-factor authentication for Aer Club, and Apple Pay and Google Pay. Line manager for six full-time employees and many contractors.
Java, Spring Boot microservices, AWS, JBoss, IBM WebSphere MQ, REST, Git and Jenkins.
July 2016 — November 2017
Dublin, Ireland
Accenture
Senior Developer
Senior developer on the Revenue Case Management team in the Revenue Commissioners' IT division. Earlier in the engagement he was senior developer for the extraction, transformation and loading of financial information for individuals and companies from EU countries into the Revenue business-intelligence data warehouse, with integration to the internal Revenue website for summarised and detailed reports.
Java, Spring (REST, JPA, MVC and Webflow), JSP, JSON, JavaScript (Angular and jQuery), Groovy, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Oozie, Sqoop, Ingres, GitLab and Jenkins.
September 2014 — April 2016
Dublin, Ireland
Future Finance Loan CorporationFuture Finance Loan Corporation
Director of Technology
Head of the technology team, with responsibility for development, deployment infrastructure, security and office infrastructure, including staffing, hiring, appraisals and training. Managed a team of ten developers in Dublin and the relationship with a remote contractor for user-interface development. Introduced Scrum, Kanban and continuous integration. Deployed the UK and German websites on Microsoft Azure, including budgeting for the service, reliability and performance monitoring, and the production escalation policy. Security work included regular penetration tests on websites and databases, and management of the data backup strategy.
Ruby on Rails, Node.js, REST, Java EE, JSF, JavaScript, Spring, Hibernate, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Microsoft Azure and Git.
May 2008 — June 2014
Dublin, Ireland
Xiam Technologies / Qualcomm
Senior Staff Engineer / Manager
Managed a team of four developers based in Dublin, Singapore and Manila. Technically led the design, development and deployment of the Xiam recommendation product for Vodafone, Verizon, Telefonica, AT&T and Firethorn, including client and web-service components, on-site requirements workshops and end-user training. Scrum master for three major releases of the Xiam Android applications Glance and BatteryGuru, available on Google Play. Senior developer on the redesign of the Xiam Management Console, including site security with Spring Security and database migration scripts for Oracle and SQL Server. Championed test-driven development and UML.
Android, Java (EE/SE), Spring, JPA, REST, JAX-RS, JAX-WS, JSP, Struts, JavaScript, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM WebSphere, Tomcat, GlassFish and Perforce.
February 2004 — April 2008
Dublin, Ireland
WeDo Technologies
Senior Consultant / Project Team Leader
Led a major version release of a core CAPE product, RevenueOffice Platform Integrity, and was a senior member of a six-person team building a rating engine for call-rating validation. Also managed a project to update a toolkit product packaged as an Eclipse-based application, with teams of four to six people depending on the phase. Work included requirements, analysis, design, implementation, documentation and quality assurance, and on-site customer workshops.
Java (EE/SE), Spring, Hibernate, JSP, Struts, JavaScript, JBoss, Oracle and CVS.
July 2002 — February 2004
Dublin, Ireland
MobileAwareMobileAware
Senior Software Engineer / Project Leader
Senior member of a four-person team on a content-delivery solution for mobile phones and PDAs, using SMS, MMS and WAP Push, with UML used throughout the design. Managed a project to update authoring environments used by web developers, and another to improve performance with JSP tag libraries, add features and fix the previous release, with teams of three to eight people. Both used Extreme Programming. Also a senior member of the Everix Mobility Suite development team.
Java EE, JSP, Oracle, WebLogic, Apache Tomcat and CVS.
February 2000 — June 2001
Dublin, Ireland
IONA TechnologiesIONA Technologies
Principal Engineer
November 1998 — February 2000
New York
Mail.com
Senior Software Engineer
November 1993 — November 1998
Parsippany, New Jersey
Dialogic Corporation
Group Leader
March 1989 — November 1993
Bridgewater, New Jersey
Hamamatsu Photonics Systems
Software Engineer
1983 — 1987
Dublin, Ireland
Dublin City University
Bachelor of Engineering, Electronic Engineering
Contact
Get in touch
The best way to reach Bernard is by LinkedIn or email.