What is a platform engineer?
A platform engineer is an IT professional responsible for planning, creating, and implementing internal development platforms (IDPs) and golden paths (predefined workflows) for developers to easily access and use critical tools, infrastructure, and services.
In contemporary IT operations and development ecosystems, platform engineers are particularly influential because they innovate new robust, scalable, and streamlined platform solutions to enhance developer productivity. As technology advances at previously unseen speeds, platform engineers are an invaluable resource to help enterprises and their developers navigate and prosper in increasingly complex environments.
The role of a platform engineer has come into the spotlight with the rise of platform engineering, a discipline dedicated to designing and implementing unified and automated self-service platforms.
These enable developers to access critical infrastructure; however, platform engineering can’t exist without the platform engineers who drive it and the growing platform ops methodology.
This article discusses the role of a platform engineer and also contrasts platform engineers with DevOps engineers. It then explores a platform engineer’s main responsibilities and the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with their work.
However, before we delve into the intricacies of who platform engineers are and what they do, it’s important to revisit a few key concepts and details about platform engineering itself: What is it, and why is it so important today?
What is platform engineering?
Increasingly complex infrastructure and technology ecosystems are exacerbating the inherent limitations and challenges of traditional development approaches, leading to slower agile development pipelines. Developers often lack easy access to critical development infrastructure and services due to convoluted infrastructure delivery models.
Platform engineering simplifies development processes by providing devs with a unified platform and self-service capabilities to access all the resources they need. This enhances overall productivity, governance, and agility.
By 2026, Gartner says 80% of software development companies will have internal platform teams to provide developers with reusable application development resources, a dramatic increase from 45% in 2022. Such teams will primarily comprise platform engineers.
DevOps challenges and the rise of platform engineers
In traditional DevOps ecosystems, there are often too many disparate tools spread across complex multicloud and hybrid cloud environments for developers to access with ease. The consequences of this include development silos, redundant infrastructure, wasted resources, and operational inefficiencies.
Businesses need IT professionals who can develop comprehensive platforms with strong development toolchains. That’s why the role of the platform engineer is so critical today.
Simply put, platform engineers aim to make life easier for developers. This typically involves laying the foundation via a unified internal developer platform, integrating a standardized set of tools and infrastructure, and offering simple self-service capabilities that can enhance developer productivity and morale throughout the application development lifecycle.
The following section provides a thorough comparison of platform and DevOps engineers. By understanding how these two important roles overlap and differ, businesses can maximize the potential of their platform and DevOps engineers.
To fully grasp the need for platform engineers, organizations have to be aware of the challenges in DevOps environments. While the fundamental objectives of DevOps and platform engineering are similar, traditional DevOps environments often fall victim to infrastructure and tool sprawl.
Platform engineers vs. DevOps engineers
While platform engineers and DevOps engineers share several things in common, there are some critical differences. The table below compares the two roles through the lens of focus areas, key differences, and mindset/approach.
| Platform engineer | DevOps engineer | |
| Definition | Builds and implements internal developer platforms Primary objective: Provide developers with automated, streamlined, and self-service access to critical development infrastructure | Facilitates closer collaboration between application development and IT operations Primary objective: Accelerate and optimize the software development lifecycle (SDLC) |
| Focus areas | Platform design and implementation, CI/CD pipeline optimization, container orchestration, cloud infrastructure management, and IDP reliability and scalability management | Automating the application development lifecycle, unifying development ecosystems with IT operations, creating secure pipelines, and monitoring and logging activities across development processes |
| Key differences | Primarily works with developers to make sure that intricate application development needs are being met Works on backend infrastructure to ensure that developers have timely and secure access to important resources | Works with various other team members from software development, IT, and security backgrounds Works across the entire SDLC, instead of focusing on a single platform or toolchain, to optimize speed, security, and quality |
| Mindset/approach | Hones in on the platforms themselves, i.e., the IDPs, golden paths, and integrated toolchains Focuses on ensuring that IDPs are long-lasting, reliable, and scalable | Focuses on achieving development agility Fosters a culture that relies on constant communication, collaboration, feedback, and iterative optimization to ensure proactive optimization of agile development pipelines |
Learn more: DevOps vs. Platform Engineering–Understanding the Differences
In short, both platform engineers and DevOps engineers seek to optimize the software development lifecycle. They just approach this overarching objective in different ways. Both roles are crucial and symbiotic—and both are here to stay.
Key responsibilities of a platform engineer
Platform engineers have numerous responsibilities, ranging from designing robust IDPs to reinforcing the security and compliance posture of development environments. It’s important to note that the impact of these responsibilities can transcend development environments and result in high-level and long-term organizational change.
Let’s explore some of a platform engineer’s most important responsibilities.
IDP building and maintenance
For developers, IDPs are the mothership from which they can access critical tools, resources, and infrastructure. This makes creating and managing robust and scalable IDPs one of the primary responsibilities of a platform engineer.
After establishing a customized centralized platform, they will then communicate with developers and leverage data-driven insights via monitoring and reporting tools to find areas for improvement.
Learn More: Internal Developer Platforms vs. Internal Developer Portals–What are the Key Differences?
CI/CD pipeline management
By creating golden paths for developers, platform engineers ensure that CI/CD pipelines benefit from automation, built-in governance, robust security, and quick feedback loops.
They also continuously monitor CI/CD pipelines, from code to deployment, to ensure they are following the overall strategy, best practices, and governance guardrails.
Infrastructure automation
Automation plays a major role in platform engineering, enabling developers to access optimal resources with minimal human interaction or error. Platform engineers conduct infrastructure automation using numerous tools and automation scripts, while also ensuring that automation doesn’t come at the price of strong security and compliance.
With infrastructure automation, platform engineers can boost the productivity and morale of developers, making sure they are able to focus on creative tasks instead of repetitive manual ones.
Toolchain integration and standardization
Solving the problem of disparate toolchains and suboptimal collaboration is one of platform engineering’s biggest selling points. Platform engineers work on integrating optimal toolchains and ensuring seamless collaboration between tools and technologies across the entire application development lifecycle.
In addition to standardizing the tools themselves, platform engineers also standardize protocols and policies, helping to nurture unified and collaborative development environments.
Collaboration with development and operations teams
Similar to what DevOps engineers do, this responsibility involves gathering insights from both software and operations teams to further optimize IDPs. This kind of collaboration paints a clear picture of successes, pain points, and requirements for end users and key stakeholders.
Using this information, platform engineers can work toward solving the intricate needs of their colleagues.
Performance monitoring
The responsibilities of a platform engineer don’t end after designing and deploying a powerful IDP. They must leverage monitoring tools and various dashboards, widgets, and reporting capabilities to evaluate the performance of their newly deployed IDP.
With development practices and technologies evolving faster than ever, performance monitoring ensures that development environments remain efficient, resilient, and productive.
Scalability and reliability
Today, software engineering teams must be prepared to scale up or down at the drop of a hat. However, in suboptimal development environments, dramatic scaling can cause performance drops. That’s why platform engineers focus on building resilient and reliable IDPs for developers, irrespective of fluctuating workloads.
Enhanced scalability drives developer productivity, while enabling software teams to bold business decisions and strategic pivots as needed.
Documentation and training
No platform engineering initiative is complete without comprehensive documentation and training. Even the best IDPs are ineffective if end-users don’t know how to unlock their full range of capabilities.
From a platform engineer’s standpoint, this involves publishing detailed documentation about the unified platforms they build and implement. It also involves planning and hosting supplementary training sessions to orient developers and other stakeholders to new IDPs and tools.
Standardization of environments and golden paths
Platform engineering is about reducing complexity and enhancing the developer experience.
Platform engineers tick that box by standardizing development environments and creating golden paths, which are predefined development workflows across the entire application lifecycle.
In this way, platform engineers ensure that developers adhere to best practices and security protocols, which also mitigates the hassles of configuration drift, a scourge in modern development environments.
Security and compliance automation
In 2024, companies around the world will face an average cost of $4.88 million if they fall victim to a data breach.
Businesses can’t afford to take security lightly, especially considering that many data breaches occur due to misconfigurations in development environments. Furthermore, compliance is always tied to security, and that’s why platform engineers also have to weave governance into their IDPs. This helps companies avoid regulatory failures with frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and others.
By automating security and compliance, platform engineers reduce human errors that cause data security failures and compliance violations.
Feature development and iteration
To ensure that IDPs don’t become stale or inefficient, platform engineers must actively communicate with end-user developers. This will help them understand the kinds of developments, optimizations, and new capabilities that will make their developers productive in a constantly evolving application development landscape.
In addition to communicating with developers and other stakeholders, platform engineers should also analyze various performance metrics to ensure the continuous improvement of their IDPs.
Platform engineer KPIs
Now that we’ve covered the key responsibilities of a platform engineer, let’s take a look at how to assess their performance via some key metrics.
CI/CD pipeline efficiency
Since optimizing CI/CD pipelines is one of the main responsibilities of platform engineers, the efficiency of these pipelines is a critical metric to evaluate. This includes the speed of collaboration, feedback loops, iterative improvements, and code changes from build to runtime.
Deployment frequency
This metric tells us how often developers deploy new applications, including updates and vulnerability fixes. Deployment speed is a reflection of how effectively platform engineers continuously optimize backend infrastructure for developers.
Developer productivity
Developer productivity doesn’t just include how much work developers do but also focuses on what kind of work they do.
For instance, if developers spend the majority of their time on laborious manual tasks, platform engineers should prioritize automation to ease the burden of those tasks as a key part of the IDP. Conversely, if developers focus on creative tasks and leave manual tasks to automated mechanisms, it’s a sign of success.
Infrastructure utilization rates
If platform engineers design efficient IDPs, developers won’t overuse or underuse infrastructure and services. This utilization metric measures whether developers are using the optimal amount of resources, including servers, storage, and applications, while maintaining consistent performance and efficiency.
Infrastructure and cost efficiency
By streamlining workflows, decommissioning redundant resources, and providing simple self-service capabilities to access critical infrastructure, platform engineers can help businesses ensure that development performance and cost savings are in equilibrium.
This indicator of infrastructure and cost efficiency gives you a measure of that balance.
Security incident response time
As the contemporary threat landscape becomes more volatile, this metric is of paramount importance. Security incident response time measures how quickly businesses can bounce back after suffering a cyber incident. This includes the quality of monitoring tools to detect threats and intrusions, as well as remediation and response capabilities to address vulnerabilities and restore critical systems.
Mean time to recovery/remediation (MTTR)
Irrespective of how resilient developer environments are, incidents are inevitable, with more complex incidents sometimes resulting in downtime or service disruptions. This KPI measures how quickly and seamlessly a development environment can be restored if an incident occurs.
A fast MTTR means that platform engineers have robust monitoring systems and powerful automated remediation capabilities in place.
Platform reliability and stability
This KPI measures whether IDPs consistently perform under varying workloads. While evaluating the success of platform engineers, it’s important to look at the quality of the underlying development architecture, the efficacy of monitoring systems to identify anomalies, and the strength of redundancy plans.
User satisfaction scores
The best way to evaluate platform engineers is to gather the perspectives and insights of their key demographic: developers. Platform teams can collect user satisfaction scores by distributing feedback forms, conducting surveys, and hosting meetings for one-on-one conversations with developers.
Summary
With platform engineering becoming an increasingly popular discipline, it’s important to understand the critical role of platform engineers. They are the true architects behind the self-service platforms from which developers easily access resources and infrastructure for app development.
As technology and development practices have grown more advanced and complex, platform engineers have become an invaluable and indispensable resource for enterprises. However, having the right platform engineering tools is critical.
Quali Torque, a robust platform engineering solution, allows platform engineers to ensure that developers can access application environments on demand. It also streamlines all of a platform engineer’s key responsibilities, from optimizing IDPs and CI/CD pipelines to integrating critical toolchains and creating golden paths.
With strong AI-powered capabilities to orchestrate application infrastructure into reusable self-service templates, Quali Torque is a one-stop solution to transcend the limitations of traditional development practices.
Learn more about platform engineering with Quali Torque, and visit our Playground today.