Alexander Reitz - Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering
About
I'm an engineering manager who started as an IT apprentice and never stopped enjoying the technical side. Today I lead platform engineering teams — the people who build the systems other engineers build on top of.
The part I like most is where technical depth meets the messy reality of scale. How do you make a 600+ engineer organization feel less slow? How do you make AI useful on a normal Tuesday instead of only in a demo? How do you build platforms that engineers actually want to use?
I'm German, based in Munich, and currently spending a stretch in Toronto. Outside work I take landscape and car photos under Lenspired. Different medium, same habit: pay attention, pick a frame, do the thing properly.
// languages
German (native) · English (fluent) · Portuguese (learning)
What I focus on
Four areas where I've put in the reps — and where I'm most useful to a team.
Developer Experience
The boring stuff that makes good engineering possible: golden paths, self-service tooling, useful docs, and defaults that save teams from yak shaving.
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS foundations, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, security, and FinOps. The goal is boring infrastructure: clear ownership, sane defaults, fewer surprises.
CI/CD & Delivery
Fast feedback, boring deploys, less ceremony. Pipelines should help teams ship instead of becoming another system they have to fight.
AI Enablement
Making AI useful in real engineering work: agent setup, repo context, training, skills, and enough guardrails that people trust the workflow on a normal Tuesday.
Career
Engineering Manager · Platform Engineering
AutoScout24
- Leading two distributed platform teams serving 600+ engineers across AutoScout24 and Trader
- Focus: Developer Experience, CI/CD, Compute Infrastructure, AI Enablement
- Pushing 'You Build It, You Run It' as an operating principle, not a slogan
- Owning cloud vendor strategy, capacity planning, and FinOps
- Working on the AI developer experience roadmap across the AutoScout24 and Trader engineering org
Senior Platform Engineer
AutoScout24
- Pulled into platform work that needed both technical depth and clear tradeoffs
- Led migrations across artifact storage, logging, and Kafka infrastructure
- Built peer-feedback culture and mentored engineers through promotions
Platform Engineer
AutoScout24
- Designed and rebuilt platform infrastructure during a major corporate carve-out
- Migrated services off legacy systems: artifact storage, logging, Kafka
- Built deep AWS expertise across infrastructure, observability, and CI/CD
- Onboarded nine engineers through structured knowledge-sharing
Platform Engineer
Scout24 Group
- Contributed to platform separation during the AutoScout24 carve-out
Software Engineer · Technical Lead DevOps
OpenText Software
- Technical lead for DevOps on enterprise archiving products
- Drove the migration from on-prem single-tenant to multi-tenant SaaS
Junior System Engineer
OpenText Software
- QA and automated deployment pipelines for enterprise archiving products
IT Specialist Apprenticeship
OpenText Software
- IT infrastructure, customer support, and Java development in a Scrum team
Tech Stack
Cloud
Infrastructure
CI/CD
Languages
AI & Tools
Leadership
AI in engineering
The hard part is not the demo. It is making the workflow useful enough that teams come back to it.
AI adoption at work
Working on the practical side of AI adoption: setup paths, training, docs, and exercises that get engineers from chat prompts to real repo work.
AI for engineering managers
Building AI workflows for manager work too: weekly team summaries, 1:1 prep, sprint health, and pulling context from Jira, GitHub, and Slack without losing half a day.
AI developer experience
Treating AI as part of DevEx now: repo context, reusable skills, PR review help, incident triage, and rules for when the agent should stop and ask.
Builders community
Running internal hackathons and Builders All Hands sessions where teams try AI on real annoyances, not toy demos.
Building in the open
When a personal automation survives real usage, I tend to put it on GitHub. Half for reuse, half so people can tell me what is broken.
Projects
neoGym
Tiny iOS fitness app I built because spreadsheets were annoying. Personal trainer mode, challenges, streaks. Side project, not a startup pitch.
Claude Code Skills
Private repo of skills and automations I use for engineering-manager work: weekly summaries, 1:1 prep, team health, and context stitching across tools.
This Site
The page you're on. Built with Next.js, Tailwind, and Framer Motion. If I put my name on it, I wanted it to feel built, not templated.
Education
Vocational School of IT
Munich · 2011 — 2014
Secondary School of Economics (Sabel)
Munich · 2009 — 2011
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate
Amazon Web Services · Jun 2021
Get in touch
If you want to talk platform engineering, AI in real engineering orgs, or the Toronto/Munich thing, reach out.
// open to
- Good conversations on platform engineering, DevEx, and AI in engineering orgs
- Speaking, podcasts, or guest writing when the topic is concrete
- Sparring with founders or engineering leaders on platform and AI adoption
- Photography and road trip chats are also fair game