Benjamin, Head of Architecture

My application process started with a phone interview, and from the technical questions aloneI could tell that CHECK24 offered a high level of specialized knowledge and exciting topics.

In the second step, I had an in-person interview. I made it clear that a people-management role wasn’t an option for me and asked what other development paths might exist. My interviewers told me about the specialist career track and outlined the role of Lead Developer, which ultimately convinced me to join CHECK24.

Within my product — the hotel comparison — I’m responsible, as Head of Architecture, for keeping the entirety of our IT architecture in view. Concretely, I have to ensure that our systems run stably, are scalable, and will remain maintainable for years to come.

Company-wide, I function like an internal IT consultant whom any colleague can approach with questions. The core technologies of Hotel are PHP, Go, and MySQL; I’m an expert in these. However, it’s important as a developer to build a broad technical foundation and keep many different technologies and solution approaches in mind.

I’m also responsible for day-to-day operations — this includes being on call. If problems arise, I need to be able to fix them quickly. And that’s where the fun is for me: having direct responsibility for a live system is incredibly exciting.

What I like most is the variety and the different tasks my job brings. A typical day might look like this: in the morning I work on a new architecture concept, then performance issues crop up in our live system and I dive into debugging, and in the afternoon I prepare an internal training session.

What I particularly appreciate about CHECK24 is the decentralized setup. Every comparison product has its own IT team and dedicated infrastructure. That’s necessary because our products are very different: a hotel comparison is fundamentally different from an insurance comparison. This way each product can use the technologies that make the most sense for its specific requirements.

We also have a huge network of experienced developers and experts in a wide range of technologies. If you have a question or get stuck, you can easily tap into this network via Slack and everyone is very helpful. In addition, there are regular cross-location exchanges within our focus groups. I often combine those meetings with a local meetup and work from that site for the day.

These days I like “boring” technologies that simply work and don’t surprise me at night. Just because something is new and trendy doesn’t mean it’s the right fit. In most cases, problems can be solved with proven technologies.

What’s exciting about the hotel comparison is that all customer requests are forwarded live to our partners. Since our partners require different types of integrations, our challenge is to find tailored solutions. Our traffic is highest in the evenings, and I regularly check to make sure our systems keep up accordingly.

I’m a big fan of IT meetups. They’re a great way to connect with other developers in the area. Because there wasn’t a PHP user group in Münster, I just started one. It’s been running for over eight years now and is very well received.

That’s hard to answer. Besides the many great summer parties and sports events, our trip to Rhodes with the entire Hotel team was my highlight.