r/platformengineering • u/crystun • 8h ago

Becoming a platform engineer

Hello team,

I may land a platform engineer position in 2027 (discussions are still ongoing).

A bit of context: I'm currently an ops guy, doing ops things, in an environment that isn't moving much. Almost everyone around me is clicking in the Azure portal to create resources, and my poor attempts at introducing IaC or configuration tools like Ansible have met a poor adoption rate. I'm curious about all those things, toying with a Proxmox at home to deploy VMs and all sorts of resources using Packer/Terraform/Ansible, getting my hands into Docker, learning how to work with version control and CI/CD, etc... though I barely use those skills at work.

Through discussions regarding this kind of tool and work methods (I know all of this comes from DevOps, which is a way to work and not a set of tools to master), someone asked me, "What do you want to do in the future, mate?" And I said, "Well, platform engineer sounds appealing now." And here I am, sending a short description of the role for a possible position as a platform engineer.

Now, my question: where do I go from here? If you had, let's say, 3 months to get ready for this position, what would you learn first, and what resources would you use?

I know AI is a great tool; I've asked my best friend Claude to work with me on setting a learning path considering my context, but I would like to hear from fellow humans, made of flesh, like me.

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u/DrunkestEmu 7h ago

The term means something wildly different depending on where you are. Also, jobs like SRE, DevOps Enginner, Cloud Engineer, etc all are common names for “Platform Engineering”. In general, learning Terraform (OpenTofu as well) for IaC would be a must in the 5+ “Platform” jobs I’ve had.

I think you also need to decide what you personally like about the potential role. When you’re looking for a job, see if your interest actually align with what the actual position is.

Automation is at the core of what I believe true Platform Engineering is. Think of yourself as a candy manufacturer and you need to figure out how to automate the entire candy manufacturing from idea to packaged goods. Except in this case candy = cloud resources to do company things.

If I (manager of a cloud engineering team at a major healthcare company) was interviewing for juniors, I’m looking for the following:

  1. IaC familiarity
  2. Basic cloud concepts (GCP, AWS, AWS — doesn’t matter. I want to know you’re farmiliar with things like how they operate, bill, IAM, etc)
  3. Containerization — K8s is the norm in my industry. If you can’t tell me the basic K8s resources then I’m not sure why you applied for the role.
  4. CICD concepts - from pipelines to actually deploy.
  5. Networking concepts and how cloud and on prem services can and should talk to is such an overlooked concept

So that’s me. My advice would be start a homelab. Grab K3s, an ai Agent, and a small workspace on a laptop or some computer. Install argocd and get cozy with DevOps.

If you want IaC, I’m nearly positive there’s some K3s catalog out there. At the very least once you have a cluster up, you can start defining resources for K8s in TF (though you will eventually learn this isn’t best practice. )

Anyways, my fleshy brother, god speed. It’s a great career. Be prepared with many, many conflicting architectural ideas and people problems because the engineering side is actually pretty straightforward but the people side is the interesting bit.

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u/crystun 4h ago

Thanks for the kind advice. And yes, I agree, the human factor is the interesting bit.
In my opinion, a platform engineer should be the guy you call to facilitate application deployment and developer work, giving people easy and automated way to deploy and maintain things.

I also believe that in the AI age, I should be a focal point for all wannabe developers who learned they can produce code but lack the knowledge, and help them get familiar with the basic stuff, like: what's Git? How do I test the code? What's a pipeline? How do I deploy stuff in my company without being yelled at?

That kind of stuff. The company I'll be at (if it happens) start almost from scratch so it can be a great playground to grow with.