Hello, I'm
Joel Berger
Engineering executive with 26 years leading technology organizations at Nationwide and Bread Financial. Founded and now leads Platform Enablement within Bread Financial's Platform Engineering organization, driving AI-powered software delivery (AIDLC) and modern engineering practices for a public financial services company.
/ Career
Senior Director, Platform Engineering
Bread Financial · Platform Enablement
Founded and led Bread Financial's Platform Engineering function, scaling it from a 3-team pilot into a lasting organization. Set the vision and built the cross-functional team behind the company's AI-driven software development lifecycle (AIDLC) initiative, delivering its first working proof of concept. Modernized CI/CD pipelines and reduced the enterprise defect backlog 51% year over year.
Senior Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Servicing Engineering
Promoted from Director, Engineering within the same team. Drove additional availability gains through blue-green deployments, horizontal scaling, and database connection pool optimization. Retired 125+ servers for $1.5M+ in annual savings through an evergreen API optimization program, and established end-to-end monitoring and alerting between Azure and ServiceNow to improve MTTR.
Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Servicing Engineering
Built and led the Customer/Account engineering domain behind Bread Financial's Azure-based servicing APIs. Stabilized systems following the company's largest mainframe-to-cloud migration and cut Fiserv transaction volume 20-25% through API caching and circuit breakers.
Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Digital Technology and Enterprise Integration
Promoted from Senior Manager, Applications to lead the company's full Digital Technology Office across Web, Mobile, and Salesforce engineering. Directed digital delivery for the NFL and AAA partner launches and the company's first American Express card program. Delivered the Account Center Redesign, Universal Authentication, and Mobile First programs.
Senior Director, Platform Engineering
Bread Financial · Platform Enablement
Founded and led Bread Financial's Platform Engineering function, scaling it from a 3-team pilot into a lasting organization. Set the vision and built the cross-functional team behind the company's AI-driven software development lifecycle (AIDLC) initiative, delivering its first working proof of concept. Modernized CI/CD pipelines and reduced the enterprise defect backlog 51% year over year.
Senior Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Servicing Engineering
Promoted from Director, Engineering within the same team. Drove additional availability gains through blue-green deployments, horizontal scaling, and database connection pool optimization. Retired 125+ servers for $1.5M+ in annual savings through an evergreen API optimization program, and established end-to-end monitoring and alerting between Azure and ServiceNow to improve MTTR.
Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Servicing Engineering
Built and led the Customer/Account engineering domain behind Bread Financial's Azure-based servicing APIs. Stabilized systems following the company's largest mainframe-to-cloud migration and cut Fiserv transaction volume 20-25% through API caching and circuit breakers.
Director, Engineering
Bread Financial · Digital Technology and Enterprise Integration
Promoted from Senior Manager, Applications to lead the company's full Digital Technology Office across Web, Mobile, and Salesforce engineering. Directed digital delivery for the NFL and AAA partner launches and the company's first American Express card program. Delivered the Account Center Redesign, Universal Authentication, and Mobile First programs.
/ Education
Master of Science, Computer Science
Bowling Green State University
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Bowling Green State University
Master of Science, Computer Science
Bowling Green State University
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Bowling Green State University
/ Key Initiatives
AIDLC: AI-Driven Software Development Lifecycle
Set the vision and roadmap for Bread Financial's AI-driven development lifecycle, building a cross-functional team spanning engineering, risk, cyber, and architecture to deliver the company's first working proof of concept.
GenAI Quality Engineering & Test Data Management Portal
Upgraded Quality Engineering with GenAI-powered test case generation, tagging, and selective execution, then launched a Test Data Management portal processing hundreds of requests per month.
Mainframe-to-Cloud Migration
Stabilized systems after Bread Financial's largest migration of credit card processing off mainframe to Fiserv and Microsoft Azure, cutting Fiserv transaction volume 20-25% via API caching and circuit breakers.
BreadFinancial.com & NFLExtraPoints.com Launch
Delivered BreadFinancial.com and NFLExtraPoints.com on a new Adobe Experience Manager platform, anchoring the company's brand transformation and its first card program on the American Express network.
PartnerPortal
Delivered Bread Financial's Salesforce-based brand partner platform, growing adoption to over 100 active brands.
Multi-Factor Authentication Rollout
Spearheaded a $3.5M MFA rollout at Nationwide, securing 1.5M+ online accounts.
/ Core Competencies
Platform & DevSecOps
Cloud & Architecture
AI & Quality Engineering
Site Reliability & Observability
Leadership & Strategy
Delivery Domains
/ Contact Me
Feel free to reach out. I'm always open to discussing new projects and opportunities.