Platform Engineering

Designs, builds, and maintains internal tools and workflows that facilitate all stages of the software development process.

What's a platform?

A platform in this context refers to a set of services, frameworks and patters that are made to be leveraged by the other teams in the organisation.

Sometimes it's custom-built software:

• Borg, Google's internal container management system which eventually became Kubernetes.
• Kafka, a messaging platform originally built by LinkedIn for internal use.

Most of the time it's a set of self-hosted tools that fit the (sometimes very specific) needs of the rest of the organisation.

How is it different than...?

• DevOps Engineer → bridges the gap between software developers and operations, both of which need thorough understanding of both the software and the deployment process.
• Site Reliability Engineer → responsible for ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability of large-scale systems and services.

While there is an overlap in responsibilities and skill sets, each one comes with its own area of focus.