Platform engineers and developer platform architects

Internal Developer Platform (IDP) architects turn recurring developer bottlenecks into a platform scope that fits your applications and operating constraints. They assess existing tooling before recommending what to retain or replace.

• Architecture and assessment: Map developer workflows and infrastructure dependencies. Define platform boundaries, ownership responsibilities, service interfaces and a phased implementation backlog.
• Developer portals: Configure Backstage software catalogs and templates around service ownership. Connect the portal to existing provisioning workflows rather than creating another disconnected interface.

Platform engineers build reusable infrastructure modules with Terraform or OpenTofu and expose approved provisioning workflows through an IDP. They encode environment defaults and access boundaries so developers can request infrastructure without copying configuration between projects.

For Kubernetes-based platforms, specialists configure cluster services and application onboarding templates. Crossplane can support API-driven provisioning where it fits the architecture. Work can include namespace isolation, resource quotas, environment teardown and configuration drift remediation, with exceptions documented for workloads that need different settings.

Standardize application delivery where duplicated pipelines create maintenance overhead or inconsistent release controls. CI/CD engineers build shared workflows that application teams can adopt incrementally.

• Pipeline engineering: Create reusable GitHub Actions or GitLab CI templates with automated tests and artifact publishing. Add approval gates where release policies require them.
• GitOps implementation: Configure Argo CD or Flux for declarative application deployment. Define promotion and rollback procedures, then connect deployment status to the developer portal for application-level visibility.

Keep an established platform maintainable with platform engineers who take responsibility for component upgrades and incident investigation. They review failed provisioning requests and deployment errors, then address recurring causes in shared modules or platform services.

Security work covers role-based access and secrets integration through tools such as Vault. Specialists implement Kubernetes admission policies with Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper. For operational visibility, they instrument platform services with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, then define actionable alerts and recovery runbooks against agreed service objectives.