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Platform Engineering Playbook

Your comprehensive guide to mastering Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and Production Engineering interviews and career development.

🎯 Quick Navigation​

🤖 AI/ML Platform Engineering (Hot!)​

Core Preparation​

Interview Process​

Career Development​

Introduction​

What is Platform Engineering?​

Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an "Internal Developer Platform" covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of applications.

Key Responsibilities​

  • Build Internal Platforms: Create self-service platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity
  • Enable Developer Productivity: Reduce cognitive load on developers
  • Standardize Best Practices: Implement golden paths for common scenarios
  • Maintain Reliability: Ensure platform stability and performance

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)​

Born at Google, SRE treats operations as a software problem. SREs use software engineering approaches to solve operational problems and create scalable, reliable systems.

Focus Areas: Error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, toil reduction, postmortems

DevOps Engineering​

DevOps bridges development and operations, emphasizing collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement throughout the software lifecycle.

Focus Areas: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, monitoring, deployment strategies

Production Engineering​

Pioneered by Meta (Facebook), Production Engineers work embedded with product teams to ensure services are reliable and scalable from inception.

Focus Areas: Service architecture, capacity planning, performance optimization

Career Landscape 2025​

Market Demand​

  • 87% of enterprises are prioritizing platform engineering (Gartner, 2025)
  • 25% average salary premium over traditional ops roles
  • 4x growth in platform engineering job postings since 2021

Top Skills in Demand​

  1. Kubernetes & Container Orchestration (mentioned in 76% of job posts)
  2. Cloud Platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) (72%)
  3. Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Pulumi) (68%)
  4. GitOps & CI/CD (65%)
  5. Observability & Monitoring (61%)

Career Progression Paths​

Junior Platform Engineer (0-2 years)
    ↓
Platform Engineer (2-5 years)
    ↓
Senior Platform Engineer (5-8 years)
    ↓
Staff/Principal Platform Engineer (8+ years)
    ↓
Distinguished Engineer / Engineering Manager

How to Use This Playbook​

🚀 For Interview Preparation​

4-8 Week Plan:

  1. Week 1-2: Master Technical Fundamentals and review Algorithms
  2. Week 3-4: Practice System Design and Coding Challenges
  3. Week 5-6: Polish Resume and prepare Behavioral Stories
  4. Week 7-8: Study Company-Specific materials and practice Troubleshooting

📈 For Career Development​

🌟 Top Resources by Category​

Essential Learning Paths​

Must-Read Books​

  1. 📚 Site Reliability Engineering - Google's SRE bible (Free)
  2. 📚 The Site Reliability Workbook - Practical SRE (Free)
  3. 📚 Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann
  4. 📚 The Linux Programming Interface - Michael Kerrisk
  5. 📚 Building Secure & Reliable Systems - Google (Free)

GitHub Repositories​

Online Courses & Platforms​

Communities​

Frequently Asked Questions​

Q: Platform Engineer vs SRE vs DevOps - What's the difference?​

A: While these roles overlap significantly:

  • Platform Engineers build internal developer platforms and tools
  • SREs focus on reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence
  • DevOps Engineers emphasize CI/CD and development-operations collaboration

Many companies use these titles interchangeably, so focus on the job responsibilities rather than the title.

Q: Do I need to know how to code?​

A: Yes! Modern platform engineering requires strong coding skills. Focus on:

  • Python or Go for automation and tooling
  • Bash for system administration
  • Understanding of data structures and algorithms

Q: Which cloud should I learn first?​

A: Start with AWS as it has the largest market share, then expand to GCP or Azure based on your target companies. The concepts transfer well between clouds.

Q: How important are certifications?​

A: Certifications can help, especially early in your career, but hands-on experience is more valuable. Popular certifications:

  • AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer
  • CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator)
  • GCP Professional Cloud Architect

Q: What's the typical interview process?​

A: Most companies follow this pattern:

  1. Recruiter screen (30 min)
  2. Technical phone screen (45-60 min)
  3. Onsite loop (4-6 hours): Coding, System Design, Behavioral, Domain expertise

Success Stories​

"After 8 weeks of preparation using this playbook, I received offers from 3 FAANG companies and increased my compensation by 65%." - Senior Platform Engineer

"The system design section was invaluable. The real-world scenarios matched exactly what I was asked in interviews." - Staff SRE

"Coming from a traditional sysadmin role, the coding challenges section helped me level up and land my dream platform engineering job." - Platform Engineer

Contributing​

We welcome contributions from the community! This playbook gets better with every addition.

How to Contribute​

  1. Fork the repository
  2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b add-new-resource)
  3. Add your contribution with clear descriptions
  4. Submit a pull request with details about your addition

Contribution Guidelines​

  • ✅ High-quality, actively maintained resources
  • ✅ Relevant to platform/SRE/DevOps engineering
  • ✅ Include brief descriptions of why the resource is valuable
  • ✅ Mark paid resources clearly
  • ❌ No promotional or low-quality content
  • ❌ No outdated or unmaintained resources

Stay Updated​

Support​

License​

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms:

  • Give appropriate credit
  • Indicate if changes were made
  • Share under the same license

Last Updated: January 2025 | Version: 1.0.0

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