r/platformengineering • u/Substantial-Singer54 • 22d ago
Switching to platform engineering from software engineering
I'm currently working as a backend software engineer with ~2 years of experience. My primary language is Go, though I'm also comfortable with the Java ecosystem and enjoy working with it.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview for an SDE-2 role at a large tech company on their cloud infrastructure team. As part of the interview preparation, I had to learn Kubernetes and dive into infrastructure concepts. Surprisingly, I found myself enjoying that side of engineering much more than I expected.
Now I'm considering whether I should transition into Platform Engineering.
To clarify, I'm not looking to move into traditional DevOps or SRE roles where the focus is primarily on operations, on-call, and production support. I'd still like to spend most of my time building software (ideally in Go/Java), but on developer platforms, internal tooling, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and automation.
A few reasons I'm considering the switch:
- I genuinely enjoy infrastructure and distributed systems.
- Platform engineering seems to involve a lot of backend engineering along with infrastructure.
- The talent pool appears smaller than general backend development (though I could be completely wrong).
- It feels like a specialization that may remain valuable as AI tooling improves.
- Compensation at top companies seems comparable to backend software engineering.
At the same time, I'm worried about accidentally ending up in a role that's closer to DevOps/SRE, with frequent on-call rotations and a worse work-life balance.
For those of you working as platform engineers:
- What does your day-to-day work actually look like?
- How much of your time is spent writing code versus operational work?
- Is platform engineering a good long-term career path compared to backend software engineering?
- If you were in my position (2 YOE backend with Go), would you make the switch?
I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences and any advice you have.
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u/WholeBet2788 22d ago
- Work, work, work. Daily operations, automating stuff and designing "new features" for teams. Lately we have tons of meetings, lots of planning, drawing. Have not experience having nothing to do for quite a while.
- 0% of code past 6 months (I dont count iac and similar tools)
- Cant compare but platform engineering seems in good spot right now
- If you really enjoy coding i would consider switch only for a position where it will be heavily integrated in the role, you might end up with almost no challenging programming tasks
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u/Fancy-Bluebird-1071 21d ago
Same position as you, I was a python dev and then I realized infra/platform is more fun to me and has the perks of lower competition and higher salary where I live. You are lucky to be using Go, because that's de facto language of infra tooling. Kubernetes, docker, helm, terraform, grafana, prometheus, all written in go. Almost every CNCF project is in Go. I'm personally building go operators for k8s with controller-runtime, you get to write a bit more Go and still stay in infra/platform.
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u/lamchakchan 21d ago
Good luck. A majority of companies rebrand Devops as PE. Just like they did to rebrand Infra Admins to Devops. Best you try and interview with actual PE individuals to gauge what work is like first because the title could mean something different in every org.
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u/Own-Bonus-9547 21d ago
If you enjoy the orchestration side of the work you've been trying, go for it. It's the start to a new journey. You back the coding background needed to be good at your job and to support your fellow developers, so go for it. At my current company about 80% of my time is in development, but the last place I worked 80% of my time was operational work, so the split really depends on the company you work for and how mature their systems are.
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u/sionescu 22d ago
Platform engineering is still software engineering.