The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) this week at its KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 conference revealed it has added an intermediate-level certification for platform engineers as part of an effort to expand the base of IT engineers that have hands-on platform engineering expertise.
Developed in collaboration with the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Platform Engineer (CNPE) exam certifies proficiency in platform architecture, GitOps, observability, security, and developer experience across production-grade cloud native systems. It is based on a 120-minute certification exam that spans five key domains: platform architecture and infrastructure (15%), GitOps and continuous delivery (25%), platform application programming interface (APIs) and self-service capabilities (25%), observability and operations (20%), and security and policy enforcement (15%).
Christophe Sauthier, cloud native training and certification lead for the CNCF, said the CNPE extension to the consortium’s Certified Cloud Native Platform Associate (CNPA) certification launched earlier this year. The overall goal is to provide a vendor-neutral certification for platform engineering that enables organizations to more easily identify IT professionals with real-world experience and expertise, he added.
Demand for platform engineers is very high as organizations look to embrace what is essentially the next evolution of best DevOps practices that focuses on managing software engineering workflows at scale, said Sauthier. It focuses more on people and processes rather than mastery of a set of DevOps tools, he added.
The CNCF plans to expand the number of platform engineering certifications it offers as part of an effort to enable continuous education across the cloud-native community. A CNCF report estimates there are now 15.6 million developers with cloud native computing skills, of which 9.3 million are focused on backend services.
The report estimates that well over half of DevOps professionals (58%) are now working with cloud native tools and platforms, with adoption of internal developer portals (IDPs) having risen from 23% in the third quarter of 2024 to 27% this year. However, the proportion of developers reporting their organization has a dedicated team for improving developer experience (DX) decreased from 44% to 40%, according to the report.
Among application developers with DevOps expertise, container orchestration (28%), cloud monitoring (33%), and cloud function or serverless computing (26%) are the top technologies employed. In general, after Kubernetes, the report finds the most widely used technologies employed are observability tools (28%), event-driven architectures (27%), and streaming and messaging services (26%).
It’s not clear how many actual platform engineers there are, but as more organizations look to hire IT professionals with these skills there will be more human resource departments, as always, screening candidates for open positions that are often higher paying based on how many certificates they have. For the first quarter of 2025, the minimum average salary for a platform engineer role is $143,001. The maximum average salary is $201,074, bringing the average salary to $172,038.
Not having a certificate doesn’t mean a qualified candidate won’t be hired, but it does mean those that lack one will find it a lot more challenging to be considered for jobs they might from hard-won experience be more than eminently qualified to perform. However, the more certificates they do have the more likely it becomes they will also have multiple job offers to entertain.