Hire Platform Engineers

Why Hiring Platform Engineers Is a New Kind of Challenge

Platform engineering is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in tech, and that rapid growth has created a massive talent gap. Companies building internal developer platforms need engineers who combine deep infrastructure knowledge with a product mindset — people who can design self-service tooling that makes hundreds of other engineers more productive. This combination of skills is rare and extremely hard to evaluate.

The confusion starts with the title itself. Platform engineering overlaps significantly with DevOps, SRE, and infrastructure engineering, but it requires a fundamentally different orientation. A strong DevOps engineer might build a great CI/CD pipeline, but a platform engineer needs to build the abstraction layer that lets every team in the company deploy safely without understanding the underlying pipeline complexity. This "platform as a product" thinking is what separates the best candidates.

Exodata's engineers evaluate platform engineering candidates on their ability to design developer experiences, not just infrastructure. We assess how they think about building golden paths, managing Kubernetes multi-tenancy, designing self-service workflows, and creating the abstractions that reduce cognitive load for development teams. You get candidates who build platforms developers actually want to use.

What Our Engineers Assess

Every platform engineer candidate goes through a live technical assessment with our engineering team. Here's what we evaluate:

• Internal Developer Platform (IDP) design — self-service portals, developer experience, golden path architecture, and Backstage/Port integration
• Infrastructure as Code at scale — Terraform modules, Crossplane, Pulumi, and managing multi-environment, multi-team infrastructure
• Kubernetes platform management — multi-tenancy, namespace strategies, admission controllers, and resource quota governance
• Service mesh and networking — Istio, Linkerd, Envoy, traffic management, mTLS, and observability integration
• CI/CD platform design — building reusable pipeline templates, artifact management, and developer self-service deployment workflows
• Platform-as-product thinking — user research for internal tools, adoption metrics, documentation strategy, and iterative platform improvement

Common Tech Stacks We Vet For

Engagement Options