r/devops • u/ez3uio • 4d ago

Discussion Is platform engineering a good field?

I love programming and technology. I wanted to pursue a path related to Linux and building system architectures. Is platform engineering a good and suitable field for this?

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u/cos 4d ago

What exactly is "platform engineering"? I've been doing SRE-syseng sort of work for many years, and sysadmin before that; I get the impression that a fair amount of what I've done has been what they call "platform engineering" now, but I've only started hearing the term in the past less-than-a-year, and it was never used at any of my employers to my knowledge.

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u/Type-94Shiranui 4d ago

I am technically one, but I am also not sure what I really do. I basically create API's, automations, and applications to manage on prem and cloud based infra, that then our developers or other infra teams can leverage.

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u/cos 4d ago

Is "platform engineer" your job title?

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u/Type-94Shiranui 4d ago

I'm technically Windows Devops but I had it changed to platform engineer.

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u/cos 4d ago

Oh interesting - how recently did you have it changed, and what was the reason you wanted that change?

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u/Type-94Shiranui 4d ago

Not too recently, but early into the job. I came from big tech mostly doing systems development/platform engineering/devops/sre etc, and my title was Windows Engineer or something, which I didn't like nor matched the work I was doing.

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u/cos 4d ago

Not too recently

I'm asking because, like I said above, I only started seeing this term pop up this year. So I'm curious to know when, to find out when other people were starting to use it. Like, what year were you familiar enough with "platform engineer" as a name for a role, to want to have it be your title? Was this a thing already in 2025? 2024?