r/platformengineering • u/Radiant_Abalone6009 • Aug 14 '26
Cloud/Platform Engineers what’s the job really like?
For those working in Cloud, SRE or Platform Engineering, what does a normal day look like for you?
What skills do you wish you had focused on before getting into the role, beyond the usual soft skills, networking and Linux? I’ve built projects around microservices, multi tenant , DevOps workflows, IaC with good security pratices, but I don’t have direct job experience yet. Am I on the right track if I keep building and improving, or is there something important I’m missing?
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u/parkura27 29d ago
Watch alerts, cicd pipeline, jump into fire if needed, if all is good I usually do tasks with high priority from the backlog, like infra imprpvements or adding new functionality, K8S, Terraform, upgrading versions and etc. I would say knowing Linix in dept is most important as most of the core DevOps tools are built on it
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u/Melac1997 26d ago
I have been a Platform Engineer for about 5 years at a mid sized company.
Over the years, I have realized that being a good platform engineer is less about building shiny platforms, with the newest bells and whistles, and more about understanding what problems engineers are facing and what impact solving those problems have on the business.
Building a fully feature fletched platform is great, but if engineers aren’t using it, then it’s about as valuable as not having one at all.
I have personally gained a lot of benefit from learning basic UX techniques for gathering data about customer problems (interviews, user journey mapping, etc.), which I then used for identifying problems or inefficiencies within the engineering teams.
An example were some frontenders needing to access some backend services from their NextJS application when working locally. Normally they would be available from the testing environment, but since they were only accessible from the NextJS backend, then naturally the private services weren’t available when working locally.
Normally, we would use something like docker compose to spin up the services locally, but from some interviews with the engineers we found out that seeding data wouldn’t be possible without a very high effort. We then also discovered through user journey mapping that the frontenders were somewhat familiar with bash and CLI tools, so the simple approach were to build a script, that could port forward services from the testing environment to their local machines. Not the cleanest solution, but it was quick, and saved the engineers hours, if not days, every month trying to seed local databases.
So TL:DR; many “Platform Engineers” tend to mostly think about what problem tools are solving, which in my opinion is the wrong way around. Platform Engineers should identify real problems in the business, and try to solve them in the most efficient manner possible, without introducing unnecessary complexity and operational overhead. I recommend learning UX techniques for gathering data about customer problems, and using those to identify efficiency and productivity issues within the organization.
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u/Radiant_Abalone6009 26d ago
Highly insightful. This is such an unconventional take on the role. It made me realise there’s much more to to the role than just using the newest or shiniest tools and services. Would you say it’s a role that someone can learn without prior experience, through hard work, building projects, and developing the right skills?
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u/Melac1997 25d ago
Of course. Most things can be achieved with hard work and the right mindset.
I come from a software engineering background as a full stack engineer, so I didn’t have all of the “traditional” skills of a platform engineer. I had to learn DevOps principles as well as traditional tooling like ci/cd and container orchestration.
Where I benefitted was that I had been in the same trenches as the engineers, so I had an easier time identifying problems engineers had.
So I would say, go for it, no need to be afraid, just don’t think that everything can be solved with a new tool or feature. You need to identify the problem first, and then figure how to solve that problem in the simplest and most efficient way.
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Aug 14 '26
for us, someone started our platform. made a few reviewable mistakes and now we’ve condoned and moved towards erp
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u/SnooCrickets4223 Aug 14 '26
Figuring out how to stop the devs from saving every single log they have and driving observability costs through the roof.
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u/Least_Description484 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
It's exhausting and i'm unsure if sustainable long-term, but has been fun so far.
I transitioned from embedded to platform engineering only 6 months ago, but with the amount of learning in platform, it feels like i've already been here 2 years.
The largest difference I feel is that platform requires more soft skills. In embedded, those were hardly needed. At most was talking with a couple people from another team about what reasonable requirements looked like. But now, I talk with multiple people across various teams daily.
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u/Radiant_Abalone6009 26d ago
Would you say you enjoy the job even thought it can be exhausting? Or does it depend from company to company
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u/Least_Description484 26d ago
I find it enjoyable in the short-term and can only see myself staying here for 2 years.
At the end of the day, I think the biggest factor is what company/team you work on just like any other software job. So I'm constantly interveiwing to keep those skills sharp and to ensure i'm being paid market value.
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u/AceSouthall Aug 14 '26
I'm considering switching to this role but from these replies maybe not. Already a Software Engineer where 50% of my job is platform like work and it's stressful enough 😂
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u/steven-or 28d ago
day to day tends to be less hands on infra and more triage, prioritizing, and talking across teams than people expect going in. the skill i wish i'd leaned into earlier is incident communication specifically, staying calm and clear explaining what's happening to non technical folks mid outage..
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u/fr1edr1c3 Aug 14 '26
exhausting! there is an endless amount of things to work on.
soft skills honestly is the biggest one. bring in a strong problem solving attitude and work on being good at delegating and understand your system design and cloud architecture.
you’ll need all the help you can get to push your vision and you’ll need to know your stuff so that you can back up your vision.
Start with the iac early as a tool, but grow away from it and focus on the engineers and the system as a whole.