I’ve Just Been Made a Platform Engineer: Now What? 

Congratulations! You’ve landed a job with the Platform Engineer title. Excited? Check. A touch of ‘what have I gotten myself into?’ Check. If that sounds like you when you got the job, you’re not alone. 

Platform engineering has emerged as a critical discipline and as the cornerstone of several products in modern software delivery that bridge the gap between development and operations to create smoother, faster and more reliable ways to production and deployment. 

But with this new role comes the question: Now what? 

You might be wondering about your new platform engineer responsibilities or how to get started. This article will help guide you through those initial steps, critical focus areas, and some key considerations. I’ll map out a path to help you not just survive, but thrive in your new role, building a platform engineer roadmap for your first 90 days and beyond. 

Understanding Your New World: The First Days – Listen, Learn and Map 

Resist your urge to dive in and start building immediately. Your first month, or even your first 90 days as a platform engineer, is primarily about discovery and not drastic changes. The first part of your job is to understand the existing ecosystem, the people, and the challenges they face. 

Start by conducting stakeholder interviews: 

• Developer Teams: Who are your primary customers? What are their biggest pain points with current tooling, processes, and infrastructure? What slows them down or causes frustration? 
• Operations (Ops): Understand the existing infrastructure: what’s stable, what’s fragile? What are the current reliability concerns and operational burdens? How are incidents handled? 
• Security: What is the current security like? What are the key compliance requirements, and how are they currently enforced or monitored? 
• Product/Business: What are the key business drivers? How can the platform better support the organization’s strategic goals and speed up value delivery? 

Next, audit the existing systems: 

• What tools are currently in use for CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), observability, containerization, artifact management, and so on? 
• What’s the current state of automation across the software development lifecycle? 
• Where is the documentation for these systems? Is it comprehensive, outdated, or absent? 

As you gather this information, you’ll naturally start to identify quick wins. Keep notes, but don’t act on them. The aim for your first 30 days is to have a comprehensive map of the current landscape: the key players, their major pain points, the existing tools and processes, and a list of potential areas for improvement. 

Define your Mission & Build the Platform’s Foundation 

With the information gathered, it’s time to collate your findings. Turn your discovery notes into a list of problems that what you build can solve. A crucial lens through in which to view this is Developer Experience (DevX). Can the platform make developers’ lives easier, more productive, and reduce their cognitive load? This is a key concept in defining what a new platform engineer does. 

What does all this lead to? The Internal Developer Platform (IDP) concept. An IDP is essentially a curated set of tools, services, documented best practices, and automated processes, designed to provide self-service capabilities for development teams. The aim is to create golden paths – well-supported, efficient ways for developers to build, test, deploy, and run their applications with minimal friction. 

It’s a way to turn platform engineering best practices into a product, something tangible. Industry surveys show that over half of organizations have introduced platform engineering in the past few years, with 93% viewing it as a positive move. 

Still, don’t try to build the IDP in one shot. Start small: identify the most impactful component or process you can improve. This could be standardizing a CI/CD pipeline for a particular type of service, or simplifying the process for developers to provision a new testing environment. 

When it comes to implementation, choose your tools wisely. 

• Use existing tools that are working well and have user familiarity. 
• If new tools are needed, consider open-source vs. commercial options, and the classic build vs buy dilemma. This is also where buying an end-to-end solution, or working with partners that can accelerate the creation of these elements, can be beneficial. They mean you’re not reinventing the wheel when frameworks and products already exist. 

Before you write a line of code for the new platform, get early buy-in. Share your initial strategy, your first iteration, and the ‘why’ behind it with your stakeholders and team. Get their feedback – and iterate on your plan. Then you can deliver a tangible quick win. Implement one of those low-hanging fruit items you already identified – which builds momentum, demonstrates value, and vitally, gains trust. 

By the end of this phase (around the first 60-90 days) the goal is to have a clear, prioritized roadmap for the first iteration of your platform, with stakeholder agreement and an initial delivered improvement that makes a positive difference. 

If this takes longer than expected, don’t panic. Platform engineering is a step change for any business, and getting buy-in, creating working groups, and finding data can take time. 

Pillars of a Successful Platform Engineering Approach 

As you build out your platform, several pillars underpin its success and guide your platform engineer career transition. 

• Automation is Key: From infrastructure provisioning using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or OpenTofu, to application deployment, scaling, and even aspects of incident response, automation is fundamental. It reduces toil, improves consistency, and speeds up delivery. 
• Self-Service is the Goal: The platform should give developers control, not gatekeep them. Provide paths with sensible defaults and built-in guardrails that allow teams to operate autonomously and safely. 
• Observability by Design: Make sure the platform and the services running on it, are observable. This means integrating logging, metrics, and tracing capabilities from the outset, not as an afterthought. Developers need to easily understand how their applications are behaving in production. 
• Security as a Shared Responsibility (DevSecOps): Embed security into the platform from the beginning. Provide secure-by-default configurations, tools for vulnerability scanning, and automated compliance checks. Make it easy for developers to do the right thing securely. 
• Cost Optimization (FinOps Principles): Build in visibility and controls for cloud spend. The platform should help development teams understand the cost implications of their architectural choices and resource consumption. Tools that offer clear cost visibility and governance are invaluable. 
• Reliability and Resilience: The platform you build must be as reliable as the services it supports. Implement robust monitoring, alerting, and failover mechanisms. 
• Treat Your Platform as a Product: This is a vital mindset. Your platform has users (developers), and you need to understand their needs. Maintain a roadmap, actively gather user feedback, and iterate based on feedback. Clear documentation, examples, and support channels are non-negotiable components of a product-centric approach. 

Key Skills for Platform Engineers 

Platform engineering requires a diverse skillset, blending technical depth with soft skills: 

Technical Knowledge 

You’ll need a solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization and orchestration (especially Kubernetes), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD principles and tools, scripting languages (e.g., Python, Go, Bash), networking fundamentals, and security best practices. 

Empathy 

This is perhaps one of the most crucial key skills for a platform engineer. You have to understand the challenges, frustrations, and needs of your developer customers to build a platform they love to use. 

Communication 

You need to clearly articulate the platform’s vision, its benefits, and how to use its features. This includes tailoring your communication to both technical and less technical audiences. 

Collaboration 

Platform engineering is not a solo endeavor. You’ll work closely with development teams, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), security teams, operations personnel, and product managers. 

Problem-Solving 

The ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues across a wide range of technologies is essential. 

Continuous Learning 

The cloud-native landscape and associated technologies are constantly evolving. A commitment to continuous learning is vital to stay effective and innovative. 

With these skills under your belt, you’ll be on the fast track to delivering real value into your new organization and on the promise of platform engineering faster than you can say deployment. 

What to Avoid as a New Platform Engineer? 

As you set sail on your platform engineering journey, be aware of these common pitfalls: 

• Trying to boil the ocean: Don’t build too much, too soon. Start with a focused scope, then iterate. 
• Building in a vacuum: Your platform’s success depends on adoption by developers. Regularly ask for and incorporate feedback. 
• Creating rigid solutions that stifle innovation: Golden paths provide guidance; you need to allow for flexibility, where possible. The platform should enable, not restrict. 
• Becoming a new bottleneck: If the platform becomes more complex or slower than the old way of doing things, you took a wrong turn. Focus on self-service and automation. 
• Underestimating the importance of documentation and training: Every platform needs clear documentation, examples, and onboarding support for users. 
• Not measuring success or demonstrating value: Define metrics to track platform adoption, developer satisfaction, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and system reliability. 

Stepping into a platform engineer role is challenging, but it’s also a rewarding experience. Your focus will be on helping developers, improving software delivery velocity and reliability, and driving significant business value. Remember that building out platform engineering and a successful internal developer platform is not a one-shot project – but a journey of improvement, iteration, and collaboration. 

Listen to your users. Start small. Demonstrate value early. Embrace the core pillars of good platform design. And from us at Cycloid, a warm welcome to the exciting world of platform engineering.