Wingmate
An airport social app for people stuck at the same gate. No faces until both people agree. Seat numbers stay private. Profiles disappear when you land. Bernhard designed it and builds all of it himself: backend, AI, iPhone app, tests and infrastructure.
The product
Three rules the whole app is built around
A dating app loses trust the moment a photo or a seat number reaches the wrong person. So these rules live in one module, and the tests check every one of them.
Mutual reveal
You browse anonymously. A face only shows once both people have chosen to reveal.
Seat privacy
Seat numbers stay hidden until both people agree to share them.
Gone after landing
Trip data expires when the flight lands. It's designed to end at the gate.
Engineering
What's under the hood
Offline chat
People keep chatting in airplane mode
A custom Swift plugin connects matched travellers phone to phone over Apple Multipeer Connectivity. Messages are end-to-end encrypted with Curve25519 and ChaChaPoly, strangers learn nothing, and everything syncs after landing without duplicates.
AI
Claude with a safety net
The Claude API suggests profile lines as schema-validated output. It's rate-limited, and if the model fails, a local fallback takes over, so the button never dies.
Testing
Tests stop a bad deploy
Real data
Type a flight number, and the trip fills itself in
A live flight-data API fills in the trip from a flight number. The airport list covers 189 airports worldwide, up from 45 in Europe.
Security
Security reviewed
He ran his own security review: rate limits, Google ID-token verification, and a list of findings he's fixing one by one.
Operations
Run like a real service
Every push to main is tested and deployed to Fly.io automatically. Sentry catches errors, Litestream backs up the database continuously, and a service worker never serves stale code.
Next
What's next
Put the iPhone app in the hands of real travellers.
Move photos out of the user record before usage grows, with the tests already guarding the reveal rule.
Work through the open findings from the security review before opening to the public.
Why this matters for a hiring team
He runs the operation and he builds the tools
Wingmate shows how Bernhard works: he sets clear rules, tests them, deploys automatically and keeps the service running. He's open to remote Technical Operations, AI Engineering and full-stack app development roles worldwide, as an employee or as a contractor.