Platform Engineer

Also known as: Platform Software Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Developer Platform Engineer, Internal Developer Platform Engineer, Developer Experience Engineer, Cloud Platform Engineer.

What does a Platform Engineer do?

A Platform Engineer is an engineer who builds the internal developer platform: the set of tools, templates and automation through which teams create, ship and run services on their own. Their users are the company's engineers, and they treat the platform as a product for them. Typical tasks:

• build and maintain Kubernetes clusters and the layer of abstractions on top of them;
• create golden paths, ready-made templates that take a new service to production in hours rather than weeks;
• develop CI/CD so that teams ship changes without manual help;
• describe infrastructure as code (Terraform and similar tools) and give teams self-service access to it;
• collect feedback from developers and measure how much time they lose to routine work.

When does a company need a Platform Engineer?

A company needs a Platform Engineer when it has many engineering teams and each solves the same problems in its own way: deployment, environments, secrets, monitoring. This usually happens at five or six product teams and up, after the move to microservices, when the queue of infrastructure requests grows faster than it can be handled. A common trigger is new hires needing weeks to ship their first service. If there are two or three teams working in one monolith, a separate platform will not pay off: one DevOps Engineer is enough.

Platform Engineer vs DevOps Engineer: what's the difference?

A Platform Engineer differs from a DevOps Engineer in building a product for internal developers rather than serving their requests. A DevOps Engineer more often sets up infrastructure and pipelines for specific teams; a Platform Engineer makes it possible for teams to do this themselves through self-service. What sets them apart from an SRE is the goal: an SRE owns the reliability of services in production, a Platform Engineer owns the speed and ease of development.

Platform Engineer vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a Platform Engineer?

A Platform Engineer is hard to hire because the role needs strong infrastructure engineering and a product mindset towards internal users at the same time.

• The title is new and used inconsistently: Platform Engineer is often a renamed DevOps or system administrator vacancy.
• Experience of building a platform used by dozens of teams can only be gained in a large engineering organisation.
• Many candidates are strong in Kubernetes and the cloud but have never thought of a platform as a product with users and metrics.
• Platform Engineers are highly valued where they work, and every team suffers when they leave, so companies work hard to keep them.

What to decide before hiring a Platform Engineer?

• How many teams will use the platform, and what hurts them today? Without this it is unclear whether to build a platform from scratch or tidy up what already exists.
• Is the stack fixed, or can you hire for engineering level and let them learn the language? A hard language requirement often shrinks an already narrow pool several times over.
• Will the platform have the right to set standards for product teams? If teams can bypass the platform, it stays one option among many rather than the main path.
• Do you need one engineer or the first person of a future platform team? In the second case hiring and leadership experience matter, and that changes the search profile.

Where to find a Platform Engineer?

Platform Engineers most often come from companies with strong platform teams and dozens of services: large SaaS products, marketplaces, fintech and banks, where infrastructure runs under strict regulatory requirements. A strong profile signal is contribution to open source around Kubernetes and infrastructure as code, or experience with a platform used by hundreds of developers. NEWHR finds such candidates by the results of their work, not by applications to a job post.

How to assess a Platform Engineer in an interview?

A Platform Engineer is assessed with a technical infrastructure interview and a case: design the path of a new service from repository to production for the company's teams. The head of platform or infrastructure and a representative of a product team that will use the platform usually take part.

Strong signals:

• describes the platform through its users: how many teams moved onto it and what changed for them;
• explains which feature they dropped because teams did not need it;
• suggests starting with conversations with developers rather than choosing tools.

Red flags:

• describes their experience only as fulfilling requests from teams;
• builds the platform around favourite tools rather than developers' problems;
• cannot say how they measured the platform's value.

How long does it take to hire a Platform Engineer?

We present the first candidates for the Platform Engineer role within 5–7 days of the brief. NEWHR found a Staff Platform Engineer for Synthesized in London in 1.5 months: the client met three candidates, and a platform engineer from a global investment bank accepted the offer. For Workato's platform team NEWHR hired engineers for their level rather than their language, and one of them was promoted to Staff Engineer after probation.

Related roles

• DevOps Engineer — sets up infrastructure and pipelines for teams rather than building a self-service platform for them.
• SRE — owns the reliability of services in production and SLOs, not the developer experience.
• Staff Engineer — the level of an engineer who leads decisions across several teams; a Platform Engineer can work at this level.
• MLOps / LLMOps Engineer — builds a platform specifically for training and serving ML models.
• DevSecOps Engineer — builds security into the pipelines and infrastructure the platform provides.