A Platform Engineer is a specialist technical professional who is best known for helping to bridge the gaps between hardware and software infrastructure. The role of Platform Engineer is not to be confused with DevOps Engineer, although there are some converging technologies and processes. There are key new responsibilities and ways of thinking associated with Platform Engineering.

The ‘Platform Engineer’ is not an entirely new role, although the rise of rise of microservices, container orchestration and similar technologies and processes have given platform engineering leverage to becoming a more popular infrastructure technology role.

The increased popularity and extensibility of cloud providers, Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has increased the demand for qualified Platform Engineers. Having experienced Platform Engineers in your organisation means time and resources can be put into service discovery and scaling.

Like many other technology roles, it is difficult to reach a universal consensus on what a Platform Engineer actually is. However there are some thematic occurrences, and its agree that a notable portion of Platform engineering involves is the process of selecting frameworks -- i.e. whether to use third-party frameworks, rather than making your own, while also showing how to tie the frameworks together to build a platform that applications can be built on, ensuring all individual components work together as a single, integrated whole.

Essentially, Platform Engineers enable application developers to put software into the hands of users in an easier manner - Platform Engineers build systems that allow teams to build on. Platform Engineers’ predominantly work with IaC tools including Terraform, Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, and AWS CloudFormation, most of which are open source. It will be the job of a Platform Engineer to tailor the Infrastructure as a Code tools to meet the needs of the application developers.

Infrastructure as Code has dramatically increased in popularity, and has subsequently boosted the role of Platform Engineer. Infrastructure as code removes the risk of human error, reduces cost, and improves the speed at which teams within an organization can iterate. The fewer humans involved in a systematic process, the better!

If you are a Platform Engineer seeking a new role and would like to discuss your options with a specialist consultant, get in touch today.

See current Platform Engineer jobs here:

https://www.client-server.com/job-search?term=%22platform+engineer%22