What is a Platform Engineer?
Platform Engineers design, build, and operate the internal platforms that developers use to ship software safely and quickly. Think paved roads: self-service infrastructure, golden CI/CD pipelines, secure defaults, observability, and reliable runtime environments. Your customers are internal engineers and teams.
Platform Engineer vs DevOps vs SRE
- Platform Engineer: builds reusable products (platforms) for developers: templates, pipelines, clusters, and guardrails.
- DevOps (culture): collaboration + automation across dev and ops. Not a specific role by itself.
- SRE: focuses on reliability through SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and production excellence. Many Platform Engineers use SRE practices.
Day-to-day responsibilities and deliverables
- Design self-service workflows for app teams (new service templates, golden paths).
- Manage infrastructure as code (cloud, Kubernetes, networking, secrets, policies).
- Evolve CI/CD: build pipelines, artifact standards, quality gates, and release strategies.
- Operate core platforms: clusters, runners, registries, observability stacks.
- Define SLOs, on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident improvements.
- Partner with Security to bake guardrails into the platform (RBAC, policies, scanning).
- Measure developer experience (lead time, MTTR, deployment frequency) and remove friction.
Typical deliverables:
- Platform blueprints and “golden path” service templates.
- Reusable IaC modules and secure-by-default environments.
- Standardized pipelines with quality gates and promotion workflows.
- Dashboards, alerts, SLOs, runbooks, and incident reviews.
- Platform roadmap and change communications.
Mini task: design a tiny golden path
- Pick a runtime (containerized web app).
- Define one command for local dev, one for test, one for prod.
- Add an automated test, build, scan, and deploy step.
- Document the steps as a one-page "Getting Started" for devs.
Hiring expectations by level
Junior
- Understands basic cloud, Linux, containers, and CI/CD concepts.
- Implements well-defined IaC and pipeline tasks.
- Focus on learning, documentation, and safe operations.
Mid-level
- Designs small platform features end-to-end (e.g., a service template + pipeline).
- Owns IaC modules, basic Kubernetes operations, and on-call participation.
- Improves developer experience using metrics and feedback.
Senior
- Leads platform initiatives across multiple teams; sets standards and guardrails.
- Designs resilient systems with SLOs, incident processes, and security controls.
- Mentors peers, runs post-incident reviews, drives roadmap.
Staff/Principal
- Shapes platform strategy, long-term architecture, and org-wide adoption.
- Partners with security, compliance, and finance for scalable governance.
- Migrates legacy systems and reduces total cost of ownership at scale.
Salary ranges (rough)
- Junior: ~$70k–$110k
- Mid: ~$100k–$150k
- Senior: ~$140k–$200k+
- Staff/Principal: ~$180k–$300k+
Varies by country/company; treat as rough ranges.
Where you can work
- Industries: fintech, SaaS, e-commerce, gaming, health, media, enterprise IT.
- Teams: Platform, Developer Experience (DX), SRE, Infrastructure, Cloud.
- Company sizes: startups (build fast, broad scope), scale-ups (platform productization), enterprises (governance and standardization).
- Work modes: hybrid or remote; many roles include an on-call rotation.
Skill map
- Platform Engineering Foundations: principles, platform-as-a-product, golden paths.
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform patterns, modules, state, policy.
- CI/CD Platform: pipelines, artifacts, promotion, quality gates, GitOps.
- Containers and Kubernetes: images, networking, RBAC, deployments, policies.
- Developer Experience (DX): templates, docs, portals, internal tooling.
- Observability Platform: metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, runbooks.
- Security Platform: identity, secrets, scanning, RBAC, policies, compliance-by-default.
- Reliability and Operations: incident response, on-call, capacity, chaos drills.
- Cloud and Networking Basics: VPC/VNet, subnets, routing, DNS, IAM.
Practical projects for your portfolio
Project 1 — Golden path for a web service
Outcome: A template repo that lets a dev ship a service with one command.
- Scaffold a containerized web app template with health checks and basic tests.
- Add CI steps: build, unit tests, security scan, artifact push.
- Add CD steps: deploy to a test namespace; manual approval to prod.
- Provide a one-page “How to use this template.”
- Success metric: Deploy in under 10 minutes from repo creation.
Project 2 — IaC module library
Outcome: Reusable Terraform modules with secure defaults.
- Create modules for network, compute, storage, and a managed database.
- Document inputs/outputs; add examples and policy checks.
- Add a pipeline that runs fmt, validate, plan, and policy-as-code.
- Success metric: Provision a full environment with one plan/apply and zero manual steps.
Project 3 — Kubernetes platform slice
Outcome: A small cluster setup for teams.
- Install ingress, metrics, logging, and a secrets manager integration.
- Define namespaces, quotas, network policies, and RBAC roles.
- Ship a sample app via GitOps with rollout strategy and HPA.
- Success metric: App deploys via pull request; rollback in one command.
Project 4 — Observability and SLOs
Outcome: End-to-end monitoring with actionable alerts.
- Instrument a sample service with metrics, logs, and traces.
- Define SLOs for latency and availability; wire alerts to on-call.
- Create runbooks and a dashboard that matches SLOs.
- Success metric: Alert fires only on real SLO burn, not on noise.
Project 5 — Secure software supply chain
Outcome: Scanning and signing integrated into CI/CD.
- Add dependency and container image scanning; fail on criticals.
- Sign images/artifacts; enforce verified signatures in deployment.
- Success metric: Unapproved build cannot deploy.
Interview preparation checklist
- Explain platform-as-a-product and how you gather developer feedback.
- Walk through an IaC design: modules, state, and policy enforcement.
- Whiteboard a CI/CD pipeline with quality gates and promotions.
- Diagnose a production incident using logs, metrics, and traces; propose SLOs.
- Secure defaults: secrets, RBAC, network policy, image signing.
- Kubernetes basics: deployments, services, autoscaling, rollbacks.
- Networking basics: VPC/VNet, CIDR, routing, DNS, TLS termination.
- Communicate trade-offs: speed vs safety, cost vs reliability.
- Prepare 2–3 stories of impact with metrics (lead time, MTTR, cost reductions).
Mini mock: "Design a platform for 50 developers"
- Assumptions: 10 services, 3 environments, Kubernetes, cloud provider of your choice.
- Deliverables: golden path template, CI/CD, observability, and access model.
- Risks and trade-offs: costs, multi-tenancy, scaling control plane, on-call.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
- Building tools without customer discovery: run interviews, measure adoption, iterate.
- Over-customizing per team: prefer composable standards with escape hatches.
- Ignoring reliability: define SLOs and practice incident response.
- Security as an afterthought: bake guardrails into templates and pipelines.
- Too many manual steps: automate provisioning and releases end-to-end.
- Lack of docs: include quickstarts, runbooks, and change logs.
Learning path
- Start with Cloud and Networking Basics.
- Learn Platform Engineering Foundations.
- Pick up Infrastructure as Code.
- Add CI/CD Platform skills.
- Move to Containers and Kubernetes.
- Layer in Observability, Security Platform, and Reliability & Operations.
- Improve Developer Experience and internal docs.
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with the command line and Git.
- Basic programming (any language) and reading YAML/JSON.
- General understanding of web apps and HTTP.
Who this is for
- Backend/DevOps/SRE engineers wanting to build internal platforms.
- Software engineers who enjoy infrastructure, tooling, and enablement.
- IT/Systems engineers transitioning to cloud-native operations.
Next steps
- Take the fit test to gauge your alignment.
- Pick the first skill from the Skills section and start today.
- Complete Project 1 to create a tangible portfolio piece.
Pick a skill to start in the Skills section below.