Build the internal developer platform that enables hundreds of engineers to self-serve infrastructure, pipelines, and observability without waiting for ops tickets.
Platform Engineers build and operate Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). They abstract the complexity of cloud and infrastructure so that product teams can focus on shipping features.
Platform Engineering has emerged as a mature discipline from "DevOps teams" as organizations grow. It is driven by the recognition that every product team shouldn't rebuild infrastructure from scratch.
Platform Engineers typically own Kubernetes clusters, Terraform module registries, shared pipelines, and developer portals like Backstage.
Master the complete platform engineering stack from containers and IaC through to observability and SRE practices.
Systems-level Linux knowledge is required. Process management, namespaces, cgroups, networking, and storage — the foundations that containers are built on.
Container runtime internals, image optimization, multi-stage builds, registry management, and container security — the base layer of the platform stack.
Deep Kubernetes knowledge: custom resources, admission controllers, network policies, RBAC, storage classes, and cluster management for platform teams.
Operate AKS clusters at platform scale: system and user node pools, cluster autoscaler, AAD integration, workload identity, private clusters, and upgrade strategies.
Build and maintain the organization's Helm chart library. Chart versioning, library charts, chart testing, OCI registry publishing, and golden path chart templates.
Build the IaC module registry that all product teams consume. Terraform module versioning, Bicep templates, and automated IaC testing pipelines.
Build reusable workflows, shared action libraries, and self-service pipeline templates that product teams call without managing pipeline code themselves.
Build the shared observability platform: federated Prometheus, Thanos for long-term storage, Grafana with team-level dashboards, and alerting infrastructure.
Design the shared network foundation product teams build on: hub-spoke VNets, Private Endpoints, DNS zones, and network policies for multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters.
Apply SRE principles to the platform itself: define platform SLOs, error budgets, on-call runbooks, and reliability reviews for teams onboarding to the platform.
Build a self-service platform where any team can provision a new microservice environment (AKS namespace, CI pipeline, monitoring dashboards, secrets) in under 10 minutes via a portal form.
Create a versioned Terraform module library covering AKS, networking, Key Vault, and monitoring. Teams consume modules as dependencies — infrastructure becomes standardized and auditable.
Operate an AKS cluster shared by 20 product teams with namespace isolation, RBAC, network policies, resource quotas, and per-team observability dashboards — all managed via GitOps.