How to Build a Platform Engineering Team

summary

Platform engineers make everyone on your team more successful by developing tools and standards that support consistency at scale

Platform engineering paves the way for successfully building and scaling DevOps initiatives. When set up correctly, a platform team can make every engineer across your entire organization more effective in designing and deploying applications. That’s because platform engineers are devoted to building and managing the underlying infrastructure that supports your organization’s work, while abstracting engineers away from unnecessary code tasks and cognitive load with tools designed to create consistency and efficiency at scale. In this article, we’ll introduce everything you need to know about hiring the right people to establish a successful platform engineering team structure.

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• What Is a Platform Engineering Team?
• How To Get Platform Engineering Team Structure Right
• The Necessary Skills for Platform Engineering

What Is a Platform Engineering Team?

Platform engineering teams are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure used by an organization’s other engineering and IT teams. The term “infrastructure engineering” is typically used to denote physical or hardware infrastructure, while “platform engineering” refers primarily to software infrastructure. In the cloud-first era, platform teams are tasked with building the tools, workflows, and platforms that empower engineers with self-service capabilities like golden paths and paved roads. Platform engineers are typically focused on building internal developer platforms (IDPs) to help individual engineers and entire organizations become more efficient and productive with fewer mistakes along the way. IDPs do this by creating a level of abstraction between the complexities of cloud-native infrastructure and the everyday work of developing and deploying applications.

Want to learn more about how you can purchase an off-the-shelf IDP rather than building your own from scratch? Read a free IDP whitepaper here.

How to Get Platform Engineering Team Structure Right

Structurally, platform engineers support every other aspect of your enterprise’s software development. All your product engineering teams and even your organization’s IT department will likely sit on top of your platform engineering team in a hierarchical sense. To build your platform engineering team structure correctly, consider these five key steps:

1. Have a mission: Define your platform engineering team’s purpose and create a clearly stated goal that can guide all your future projects and help earn company-wide buy-in.
2. Balance standards & autonomy: Standardization is one of the platform team’s primary goals, but it can’t come at the expense of autonomy. Find the right balance for your organization between necessary guardrails and the freedom to execute independently.
3. Adopt a product mindset: Although it may never see the light of day outside your company, your IDP is still a product in and of itself. Focus on the features that provide value, incorporate feedback from your engineers, and constantly iterate and evolve.
4. Increase iteration speed: Speaking of iterating, make sure you’re optimizing testing, iteration, and deployment so they happen as quickly as possible. Engineers can get stuck waiting for platform teams to solve problems, so efficiency is absolutely critical.
5. Identify shared issues: Understanding the issues plaguing engineers across your organization will make for better platform engineering solutions. Platform teams aim to reduce friction company-wide, which likely means killing multiple birds with one stone.

The Necessary Skills for Platform Engineering

In order to embrace platform engineering, you’ll need to hire professionals with the right technical skills. The hard skills required will continue to change as the DevOps landscape shifts and evolves, but having an interest and experience with software infrastructure will always remain. Disciplines pertaining to the underlying systems that allow software engineers to do their jobs will also be crucial; today, those priority fields might include experience with Kubernetes, SQL systems, data storage, etc.

In many ways, it’s the soft skills that make for good platform engineers that are likely to remain more consistent as time passes. These have more to do with the mindset of effective platform teams; no matter how technology grows and what new tools arise, that mindset will continue to be a necessary component in the development of internal software infrastructure. Here are some of the most important soft skills necessary for platform engineers:

• Empathy: Even though platform engineers aren’t serving external customers, they still need to be able to empathize with the colleagues that will be using what they build. Product engineers come to platform teams with problems, and the platform teams need to be able to grasp their situation in order to design and build a solution.
• Partnership: Platform engineers need to be able to anticipate how their code will be interpreted by others. In the spirit of partnership, they should be designing code that other engineers can easily read, understand, and employ for their specific use case. Code that’s only accessible to an individual engineer is virtually impossible to scale, share, and repurpose, making it a poor platform engineering tool.
• Patience: Support is also an important part of the platform engineering team’s job; even the most senior engineers might not have deep training and expertise in infrastructure topics like distributed databases, for example. A patient approach to educating engineering teams to use internal platform tools will propel forward everyone involved.
• Perspective: Platform engineers need to be able to zoom out far enough from the tool they’re building to be able to understand what works about it and what doesn’t and identify what’s missing and what can be improved. Taking a long-term view of how the internal platform is going to be used over time will make it easier to build tools that are extendable and scalable.
• Operational focus: Compared to product teams, platform engineers tackle longer-term projects with greater import in many ways; their work enables entire departments to do their jobs more effectively. That means platform teams need to be more dedicated than other engineers to measurable issues like performance, efficiency, reliability, and operability.

One of the most important benefits of platform engineering is that it addresses the skill-demand gap; skilled cloud computing engineers are hard to come by and expensive to employ. With a powerful platform engineering team in place, organizations can more easily achieve key technical outcomes without having to staff a massive brain trust of cloud engineers. IDPs reduce the need for specialized engineering talent, because they can be custom-built for each individual organization to lessen the code required to design and deploy its applications.

When it comes to the low-code/no-code approach, it helps to have a dedicated partner with experience in the space. DuploCloud’s low-code/no-code IDP is designed to help startups and small- to medium-sized businesses introduce DevOps principles like platform engineering by amplifying their DevOps teams. If you’re ready to tackle platform engineering at your company while speeding deployment times tenfold and reducing operating costs by 75%, find a vendor like DuploCloud.