How to Build a Platform Engineering Team That Scales with You

Engineering teams are under pressure to move faster, improve reliability, and maintain security—all while managing increasingly complex cloud-native environments. In response, organizations are investing in platform engineering: a dedicated function focused on building and maintaining the internal platforms developers use every day.

Platform engineering bridges the gap between infrastructure and developer experience. Platform teams build standardized, scalable, and secure internal systems that streamline development workflows. The result? Developers spend more time shipping features and less time wrestling with tooling or searching for knowledge.

In this article, we’ll walk through how to build a high-impact platform engineering team, from assessing your needs to integrating AI and internal developer portals. Whether you’re just starting or scaling your investment, this blueprint will help you get it right.

What Do Platform Engineering Teams Actually Do?

Platform engineering teams create and maintain the infrastructure, tools, and systems that enable fast, safe, and scalable software delivery. But beyond the basics, their work spans multiple domains of modern software operations:

Infrastructure & Automation

• Design and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for reproducible environments
• Standardize cloud configurations across dev, staging, and prod
• Own container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) and provisioning strategies

Software Delivery Enablement

• Build and maintain secure, scalable CI/CD pipelines
• Introduce and manage deployment strategies (e.g., canary, blue/green)
• Automate environment provisioning and teardown for ephemeral workloads

Observability & Reliability

• Instrument services for logs, metrics, traces, and health checks
• Build centralized dashboards and alerting systems
• Establish SLIs/SLOs and contribute to incident response runbooks

Developer Experience & Self-Service

• Develop internal tools and interfaces for self-service actions (e.g., deploy, request infra, generate configs)
• Integrate internal systems into a unified developer portal
• Reduce onboarding time by standardizing templates, documentation, and service scaffolds

Security & Compliance

• Embed security scanning and policy enforcement into pipelines
• Manage secrets, access controls, and audit trails
• Ensure compliance with frameworks (e.g., SOC2, ISO 27001) through platform guardrails

Platform Analytics & Insights

• Track platform usage patterns and service health across the org
• Surface insights into developer workflows, bottlenecks, and maturity gaps
• Collaborate with leadership on platform KPIs and ROI metrics

Internal Integration & Governance

• Serve as connective tissue across teams: Dev, SRE, SecOps, QA
• Define and evolve technical standards and best practices
• Champion reusability by building shared services and components

Platform engineering is about creating leverage and multiplying the impact of every developer across your organization.

Why Invest in Platform Engineering Now?

Modern software teams are shipping faster than ever—but with speed comes complexity. Tooling sprawl, inconsistent practices, and fragmented workflows can drag down developer productivity and introduce risk. Platform engineering addresses these issues at the root, offering long-term leverage for your entire engineering organization.

Here are five key benefits that make the business case clear:

Developer Productivity

Self-service tools and automated workflows reduce handoffs and eliminate context switching. Studies show that developers spend up to 40% of their time on tasks outside of core development. Platform engineering helps reclaim that time.

Standardization and Governance

A well-built platform enforces consistent patterns for deployment, security, and compliance. This minimizes risk while maintaining agility.

Reduced Cognitive Load

Cloud-native environments are complex. Platform teams abstract this complexity behind intuitive interfaces and sane defaults.

Operational Efficiency

By centralizing expertise and tooling, platform teams reduce duplication of effort and enable shared services across the org.

Reliability

Codified best practices ensure that all applications benefit from proven reliability patterns like auto-scaling, redundancy, and disaster recovery.

Step 1: Assess Your Organization’s Needs

Before you build, you need to understand where a platform team will provide the most leverage. Start with a focused assessment:

• Development bottlenecks: Where are developers losing time?
  
  • Frequent support tickets
  • Manual environment provisioning
  • Long deploy times or high failure rates
    
    
• Automation opportunities: Where can self-service replace toil?
  
  • Spinning up new environments
  • Deploying to staging or prod
  • Security scanning or secrets management
    
    
• Cultural and technical readiness: Are your efforts going to be successful?
  
  • Is leadership committed to long-term investment?
  • Are developers open to using shared tooling?
  • Do you have the right baseline of cloud, CI/CD, and IaC practices?

Step 2: Build the Right Team

Platform engineering isn’t just a technical function—it’s a cross-functional team that blends architecture, operations, and product thinking. Here’s a breakdown of key roles:

Team size guidance:

• <100 developers: 3–5 engineers covering multiple areas
• 100–500 developers: 5–10 engineers with some specialization
• 500+ developers: Multiple teams focused on specific domains (infra, observability, dev experience, etc.)
  
  

Step 3: Choose the Right Tech Stack

Building a modern platform isn’t about picking the trendiest tools—it’s about orchestrating them into a seamless, scalable experience. Your stack might include Kubernetes for orchestration, Terraform for IaC, and a mix of CI/CD, observability, and incident response tooling. But if these systems operate in silos, you’re just shifting the complexity around—not reducing it.

Here’s what a typical platform stack might include:\n

• Container orchestration: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
• CI/CD pipelines: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
• Incident response: PagerDuty, Datadog, Incident.io, Rootly
• Internal Developer Portal: OpsLevel

But tooling alone isn’t enough. Platform engineering’s true value comes from how you integrate, abstract, and expose these capabilities to developers. That’s where an Internal Developer Portal becomes the linchpin—not just another item in the stack, but the system that connects everything else.

OpsLevel unifies your tools, services, standards, and documentation into a single, intuitive interface—turning platform complexity into developer autonomy. It’s the layer that transforms your stack into a product.

A powerful stack is important. A platform experience that developers actually use? That’s transformative.

Step 4: Supercharge with AI

AI is rapidly becoming a key enabler of platform productivity. According to a 2024 Snyk report, 96% of developers now use AI tools to accelerate coding. Platform engineers can extend this leverage across infrastructure and operations too.

Use cases include:

• Automatically cataloging all components of your software ecosystem
• Summarizing lengthy tech and API docsAI-assisted code reviews to catch security issues early
• Smart auto-scaling based on traffic patterns
• Predictive alerting and incident prevention
• Generating IaC templates or documentation

The most effective AI integrations are embedded naturally into workflows and support human decision-making—not replace it. Success is measured in outcomes: fewer incidents, faster deployments, and happier developers.

The Final Layer: Internal Developer Portals (IDPs)

A powerful developer portal brings your platform vision to life. It consolidates tools, promotes best practices, and gives developers a single place to:

• Discover services and components automatically
• Run self-service actions (deploy, create resources, provision environments)
• Track service maturity and compliance
• Understand ownership and on-call responsibilities

OpsLevel makes this seamless. Our platform lets you define and enforce standards, automate software improvements, increase developer self-service, and provide visibility across your entire software ecosystem.

Platform engineering unlocks leverage. OpsLevel helps you scale it.

Final Thoughts: Build the Team That Builds the Future

A great platform engineering team is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. It improves productivity, enhances reliability, and gives your developers the tools they need to thrive.

Start small, stay focused, and treat your internal platform like a product. And when you’re ready to uplevel the experience? We’re here to help.

Book a demo →

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