What is a Platform Engineer?

Platform engineering is something we are hearing more and more about. It blends old and new concepts for how we accomplish application delivery as a modern platform team. The first step in understanding this journey is understanding what a platform engineer is.

The challenges of cloud infrastructure require a new operating model. This model naturally leads to a standardization of policy and security practices across all development teams, while also shortening timelines for new innovation and containing cost structures. 

Essentially, your goal is to build a custom internal developer platform to enable a cloud operating model. The team that builds and manages this platform is often called a platform team, and the individuals in that team are called platform engineers.

Some companies may already be doing platform engineering with a DevOps team, a site reliability engineering (SRE) team, a cloud center of excellence (CCoE), developer experience (DevEx) team, or something else. Regardless of names, the main benefit of having a team own this platform is the creation of a single point of engagement for other corporate teams such as security and compliance. This team is responsible for driving consistency, finding ways to streamline developer workflows, and scaling compliance and security practices through automation.