Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

When to Use

• Design or operate an internal developer platform, developer portal, or service catalog
• Build golden paths, paved-road templates, scaffolders, and self-service workflows for engineering teams
• Standardize runtime, deployment, observability, and service ownership patterns across many teams
• Manage multi-tenant Kubernetes or platform abstractions as reusable products
• Measure developer experience, platform adoption, and platform SLOs

When NOT to Use

• Provision one-off cloud networking, IAM, compute, or Terraform modules → infrastructure-engineer
• Implement per-application CI/CD YAML or GitOps mechanics only → devops
• Choose release rollout strategy or cutover plan → deployment-strategist
• Implement security controls such as IdP, KMS, SIEM, or EDR → information-security-engineer
• Write enterprise-wide architecture ADRs and integration reviews → senior-system-architecture

Related skills

Need	Skill
Cloud networking, core IaC modules	infrastructure-engineer
Managed cloud services under platform	cloud-engineer
Shared CI/CD, GitOps, SRE alerting	devops
Canary/blue-green rollout decisions	deployment-strategist
Pipeline and supply-chain security	devsecops
Platform IAM, KMS, SIEM hooks	information-security-engineer
Security of product runtime and tenant isolation	product-infrastructure-security-engineer
Enterprise integration ADRs and review	senior-system-architecture
Cluster deploy and day-2 K8s ops	cluster-deployment-engineer

Core Workflows

1. Platform as product

Treat the platform like a product with internal customers:

1. Identify user journeys (create service, deploy, observe, rotate secrets)
2. Define thin platform APIs—hide complexity, expose safe defaults
3. Set platform SLOs (e.g., scaffold time, deploy success rate, portal uptime)
4. Roadmap from developer interviews and toil metrics
5. Deprecate with migration windows—not breaking teams silently

See references/platform_product.md for SLOs and adoption metrics.

2. Golden paths (paved roads)

Golden path properties:

• Opinionated defaults (language, observability, auth, CI template)
• Escape hatches documented for edge cases
• Versioned templates with changelog
• Same path for 80% of services; exceptions require review

scaffold → build (shared pipeline) → deploy (standard envs) → operate (shared dashboards/alerts)

See references/golden_paths.md for template and exception process.

3. Internal developer platform (IDP)

Layers:

Layer	Examples
Portal	Backstage, custom UI
Orchestration	Argo CD, Terraform/Crossplane, Helm charts
Runtime	K8s namespaces, serverless platform
Data	Shared RDS patterns, message buses

Integrate catalog, docs, templates, and deployment in one discoverable flow.

See references/idp_architecture.md for component diagram and contracts.

4. Multi-tenant Kubernetes platform

• Namespace/tenant isolation; RBAC and network policies
• Quotas, priority classes, and cluster autoscaling
• Standard add-ons: ingress, cert-manager, external-dns, metrics, logging
• Cluster upgrades with tenant communication plan
• Policy admission (OPA/Kyverno) owned by platform

See references/platform_kubernetes.md for tenant checklist.

5. Developer portal and service catalog

• Register services: owner, tier, repo, on-call, dependencies
• Link runbooks, APIs, and SLIs from catalog entries
• Software templates (Cookiecutter, Yeoman, internal CLI) generate compliant repos
• Scorecards for maturity (tests, SLOs, security baseline)

See references/developer_portal.md for catalog fields and template standards.

6. Platform interfaces and versioning

• Publish platform contracts: breaking vs additive changes
• Semantic versioning for charts, modules, and templates
• Changelog and migration guides for each major bump
• Support window for N-1 template versions

When to load references

• IDP design → references/idp_architecture.md
• Templates and paved roads → references/golden_paths.md
• Backstage / catalog → references/developer_portal.md
• K8s multi-tenancy → references/platform_kubernetes.md
• SLOs and adoption → references/platform_product.md