Airtasker’s chief technology officer Paul Keen has left the Australian gig economy player after just over two years in the role. The company has appointed former Google Australia staffer Yaniv Bernstein to lead its engineering team following Keen's departure.
Speaking to CIO Australia on Friday, Airtasker co-founder Tim Fung, said Paul has made a really strong contribution to the growth of Airtasker in just under two years during which time the company scaled 'tasker earnings' by more than six times.
"Paul played a critical role in building and stabilising the technology and development functions during a time of growth," Fung said.
"As Airtasker scales - it was recognised that an engineering leader who had seen significant software engineering scale was required for the business. Following an extensive search, Yaniv Bernstein - who has led software engineering teams at Google, YouTube and Maps - will be leading the engineering team as we continue to scale globally," Fung said.
Keen – who was number 5 in CIO Australia’s second annual top 50 list in 2017 – is an experienced tech executive having spent more than two years as CIO at now defunct retailer Dick Smith before moving across to Airtasker.
Prior to that, Keen had a seven month stint as general manager, software development at Salmat, and between August 2011 and April 2013, he was general manager, technology and development at RedBalloon.
While at Airtasker, Keen managed an engineering team through a period of ‘hypergrowth’ for the company, increasing the organisation’s user base from 300,000 to two million in an 18-month period.
Keen led the cloud migration at Airtasker from a managed hosted environment into the AWS cloud. His team developed a machine learning natural language processing environment to classify and moderate tasks (and images) that break marketplace rules.
Keen also helped with a large capital raising and the launch of the Airtasker platform in the United Kingdom.
CIO Australia has reached out to Paul Keen for comment.
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