MeetScout24: Martin Lefringhausen, Developer Advocate for Platform Engineering

What’s your name, position and how long have you been working at Scout24?

Martin: My name is Martin Lefringhausen and I work as a Developer Advocate for Platform Engineering at Scout24. I started at Immobilienscout24 in 2014 – that was a time when things that we take for granted today such as agile working or DevOps were relatively new.

What are your main tasks and what do you love about them?

Martin: As a Developer Advocate, I help developers and product teams gain the best value from our internal Tech Platform, and provide platform teams a better understanding of the operational, business, and technical needs of Product Engineering. On a daily basis that means “sitting together” with product and platform engineers solving technical problems of any kind, distributing learnings in internal meetups and giving support in slack channels. I like that it is, on the one hand, really people-focused and, on the other hand, I can still be hands-on with technical things.

What does it take to be a good Developer Advocate?

Martin: A good Developer Advocate should enjoy helping fellow developers, bringing people together and sharing knowledge. Besides a strong technical background it is important to be able to work independently and give feedback to both parties – the platform and the feature teams. This requires a certain passion and a pragmatic personality.

What has been your biggest highlight at the company?

Martin: One of my highlights of the past years was working as a "caretaker" in the data center move to AWS migration. We managed to move our entire tech stack to AWS very efficiently. The goal of my role in this project was to provide tools, guidelines, best practices and trainings for a seamless migration to the AWS cloud.

During this time, I still worked as a Platform Engineer but the "caretaker" role in this migration project was similar to what I do today as Developer Advocate: Bringing the right people together and acting as the bridge between our product development teams and the tech platform teams. Besides that, I was the go-to person for the tech platform products and the voice of the tech platform users within Platform Engineering.

How would you describe #WorkingAtScout24 in three words?

Martin: Motivating, challenging, flexible.

How do you unplug from work?

Martin: I love to do team sport like basketball with friends, but this is  difficult at the moment, so I enjoy being in nature and listening to my (small) Vinyl collection.

Sounds interesting to you? Martin is looking for someone to join the team as a Developer Advocate. Check out the job offer here: http://bit.ly/DeveloperAdvocate