The short answer
A platform engineer builds and runs the internal platform that many product teams deploy onto — clusters, golden paths, shared tooling — and treats other engineers as customers. A DevOps engineer usually works within one team or service, owning its pipelines, infrastructure and releases. Hire platform engineers when several teams are rebuilding the same tooling separately.
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| Platform engineer | DevOps engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Other engineering teams | Their own team or service |
| Builds | Shared clusters, golden paths, internal tooling | Pipelines and infrastructure for a product |
| Success looks like | Teams adopt the platform without being forced | The team ships safely and often |
| Hire when | Several teams duplicate the same tooling | One team's delivery is the bottleneck |
The skill that separates them
Platform engineers need product judgement: what to standardise, what to leave flexible, and how to migrate teams without breaking them. Kubernetes upgrades are a good test — a platform engineer has to move every tenant through the 1.35 cgroup v1 cut-off or off Ingress NGINX, not just their own services.
Hiring for this?
Conntal places Kubernetes engineers screened by practitioners who run the platform in production, on contract, contract-to-hire or direct hire.
Related questions
What is the difference between a platform engineer and a DevOps engineer?
Platform engineers build the shared internal platform many teams deploy onto and treat those teams as customers. DevOps engineers usually own the delivery path for one team or service.
When should a company hire platform engineers?
When several product teams are each building and maintaining the same infrastructure tooling, a platform team can provide it once as a shared service.