Library
Platform and DevOps career path, levels and ladder
Updated
5 levels, from Junior Platform Engineer to Principal Platform Engineer. Each one is rated on the same 36 skills — what changes between the rungs is how good you have to be at each. A ladder from junior platform engineer to principal, covering cloud, CI/CD, containers, reliability, cost and developer experience.
- Level 1 of 5
Junior Platform Engineer job description
Runs pipelines and infrastructure tasks under close guidance.
Read the job description - Level 2 of 5
Platform Engineer job description
Operates infrastructure and CI/CD independently day to day.
Read the job description - Level 3 of 5
Senior Platform Engineer job description
Owns reliability and delivery for a platform area end to end.
Read the job description - Level 4 of 5
Staff Platform Engineer job description
Sets platform direction across teams and leads incidents.
Read the job description - Level 5 of 5
Principal Platform Engineer job description
Shapes infrastructure strategy and the hardest calls org-wide.
Read the job description
Platform and DevOps engineer levels and job titles
Platform, DevOps, site reliability and cloud engineer titles overlap a lot. This table maps each level on this ladder to the titles you will commonly see elsewhere. For how these titles line up across departments, see the job title hierarchy.
| Level on this ladder | Common job titles |
|---|---|
| Junior Platform Engineer | Junior Platform Engineer, Junior DevOps Engineer, Associate Site Reliability Engineer, Graduate Cloud Engineer |
| Platform Engineer | Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Engineer |
| Senior Platform Engineer | Senior Platform Engineer, Senior DevOps Engineer, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Senior Cloud Engineer |
| Staff Platform Engineer | Staff Platform Engineer, Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, Lead SRE |
| Principal Platform Engineer | Principal Platform Engineer, Principal DevOps Engineer, Principal Cloud Engineer, Principal Reliability Engineer |
Individual contributor or manager?
All five titles on this ladder are individual contributor (IC) roles. They grow in technical scope and influence, not in direct reports. Many companies also run a separate manager track that branches off around Senior, such as Engineering Manager or Head of Platform. Moving between the two tracks is a change of job, not a promotion.
Skills matrix
36 skills and 3 certifications across 5 levels.
| Skill/Certification 39 | Junior Platform Engineer | Platform Engineer | Senior Platform Engineer | Staff Platform Engineer | Principal Platform Engineer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Infrastructure6 | |||||
| NoviceYou can find your way around an existing landing zone, locate the account or project a workload belongs in, and follow the paved path to deploy into it. | BasicYou can provision a new project or account from the standard landing zone template, applying the required guardrails and tagging without help. | ProficientYou can extend the landing zone with a new network segment or account type, and you judge a requested exception to the guardrails on its risk rather than on precedent. | AdvancedYou can redesign part of the landing zone to fix a structural problem, such as a blast-radius or billing boundary, and roll the change out without breaking existing workloads. | ExpertYou can set the landing zone strategy for the organization, including how new business units or acquisitions are onboarded, and defend the design to a security or compliance review. | |
| BasicYou can write a small module from a written requirement to team conventions, and add a test that applies it in a scratch environment. | ProficientYou can design a reusable module with isolated state and automated tests on every change, and refactor a production module without recreating resources. | AdvancedYou can sequence a multi-environment change to avoid an outage, and set the coding and testing standards your team's infrastructure code meets. | AdvancedYou can sequence a multi-environment change to avoid an outage, and set the coding and testing standards your team's infrastructure code meets. | ExpertYou can set the infrastructure-as-code strategy for the organization, including module ownership and how breaking changes are rolled out, and arbitrate between conflicting team standards. | |
| NoviceYou can read a network diagram and a security group configuration and explain which traffic is allowed and why. | BasicYou can configure a security group or firewall rule for a routine request, following the least-privilege pattern the team already uses. | ProficientYou can design the network segmentation and access boundaries for a new service, and tighten an existing configuration you find is over-permissive. | AdvancedYou can lead a network or access redesign spanning several services, and fix a serious gap that a security review finds, including its root cause. | ExpertYou can set the network and access architecture standards for the organization, and decide when a legacy exception is worth the risk it carries. | |
| BasicYou can rotate a routine credential following the runbook, and update every place that consumes it without causing an outage. | ProficientYou can design the rotation schedule and blast-radius for a class of secrets, and lead the response when a credential is suspected to have leaked. | ProficientYou can design the rotation schedule and blast-radius for a class of secrets, and lead the response when a credential is suspected to have leaked. | AdvancedYou can eliminate a category of long-lived secrets by moving it to short-lived or dynamically issued credentials, and get other teams to adopt the pattern. | AdvancedYou can eliminate a category of long-lived secrets by moving it to short-lived or dynamically issued credentials, and get other teams to adopt the pattern. | |
| NoviceYou can run a documented restore of a single system from backup, and confirm the restored data is what was expected. | BasicYou can verify that backups for a service are actually completing and restorable, not just scheduled, and escalate when they are not. | ProficientYou can write and test a disaster recovery plan for a service, including its recovery time and recovery point objectives, and run the drill yourself. | AdvancedYou can coordinate a multi-service failover drill, find the dependency nobody had written down, and get it fixed before it causes a real outage. | ExpertYou can set the disaster recovery standard for the organization, including which services must fail over automatically, and decide when a plan is good enough to stop drilling. | |
| BasicYou can triage a vulnerability scan, tell which findings are exploitable in your environment, and schedule the patch without being told to. | ProficientYou can run a patch cycle across a fleet with minimal disruption, and negotiate an exception for a system that genuinely cannot be patched on schedule. | ProficientYou can run a patch cycle across a fleet with minimal disruption, and negotiate an exception for a system that genuinely cannot be patched on schedule. | AdvancedYou can drive remediation of a vulnerability that spans many teams' systems, and change the pipeline so the same class of gap does not recur. | AdvancedYou can drive remediation of a vulnerability that spans many teams' systems, and change the pipeline so the same class of gap does not recur. | |
| CI/CD and Delivery4 | |||||
| BasicYou can build a pipeline for a straightforward service from the templates your team already uses, and keep it green. You track down flaky tests and slow steps rather than re-running the build until it passes. | ProficientYou can design the build, test and packaging stages for a new service on your own, including caching and parallelism, and keep run times honest. You fix the pipeline when it breaks rather than routing around it. | AdvancedYou can rebuild delivery for a repository with slow, flaky or tangled builds, and set the pipeline conventions your team works to. | AdvancedYou can rebuild delivery for a repository with slow, flaky or tangled builds, and set the pipeline conventions your team works to. | AdvancedYou can rebuild delivery for a repository with slow, flaky or tangled builds, and set the pipeline conventions your team works to. | |
| NoviceYou can run a release from the documented steps and trigger its rollback when the dashboards or the runbook call for it. | BasicYou can automate a rolling deployment to the pattern your team already uses, including health checks and an automatic rollback trigger. You test the rollback rather than assuming it works. | AdvancedYou can design rollouts under constraints such as stateful data, schema migrations or multi-service changes so a bad version reaches few users, and recover a half-upgraded service. | AdvancedYou can design rollouts under constraints such as stateful data, schema migrations or multi-service changes so a bad version reaches few users, and recover a half-upgraded service. | ExpertYou can set the release strategy the organization deploys by and decide what evidence a rollout must produce before it proceeds. You raise deployment safety in teams you do not manage without mandating one tool. | |
| NoviceYou can publish a build artifact to the registry using the pipeline steps already written, and find a published version again by its tag or digest. Someone reviews changes you make to how publishing works. | BasicYou can set up publishing and versioning for a new component to the scheme your team follows, and act on the vulnerability findings a scanner raises against images you own. | ProficientYou can run a registry for a set of services unaided: version policy, promotion between repositories, scanning gates and retention rules that stop storage growing without limit. | AdvancedYou can design artifact management across many teams, including signing and provenance, so any deployed build traces back to the commit it came from. | AdvancedYou can design artifact management across many teams, including signing and provenance, so any deployed build traces back to the commit it came from. | |
| BasicYou can add an environment or a service configuration using the infrastructure-as-code patterns your team follows, and keep secrets out of the repository. You notice when staging has drifted from production and say so. | ProficientYou can keep a set of environments reproducible from their definitions, and classify each configuration change by risk before promoting it to production. | ProficientYou can keep a set of environments reproducible from their definitions, and classify each configuration change by risk before promoting it to production. | AdvancedYou can bring environments that have drifted apart back under source control without downtime, and set the approval path your team's changes follow for each risk class. | AdvancedYou can bring environments that have drifted apart back under source control without downtime, and set the approval path your team's changes follow for each risk class. | |
| Container Platform3 | |||||
| NoviceYou can deploy a workload using an existing manifest or chart, and check its pods or containers are running and healthy. | BasicYou can write a manifest for a new workload, set sensible resource requests and limits, and debug a crash loop from the events and logs. | AdvancedYou can design multi-cluster or multi-region topology, and lead the response when the orchestration layer itself is the thing failing. | AdvancedYou can design multi-cluster or multi-region topology, and lead the response when the orchestration layer itself is the thing failing. | ExpertYou can set the container platform strategy for the organization, including what runs on it and what does not, and justify that boundary to sceptical teams. | |
| BasicYou can use multi-stage builds and slim base images to cut an image down, and you clear the scanner findings against images you own. You run the process as a non-root user because that is the standard here. | ProficientYou can build minimal, reproducible images for a new service unaided, choosing the base, trimming layers and keeping the build cache useful. You decide what belongs in the image and what belongs at runtime. | ProficientYou can build minimal, reproducible images for a new service unaided, choosing the base, trimming layers and keeping the build cache useful. You decide what belongs in the image and what belongs at runtime. | AdvancedYou can harden images for services with awkward runtime needs, and shrink the attack surface across a whole fleet without breaking builds. | AdvancedYou can harden images for services with awkward runtime needs, and shrink the attack surface across a whole fleet without breaking builds. | |
| NoviceYou can read the mesh configuration for a service and explain what traffic it allows. You apply a policy someone else has written and confirm the sidecar picked it up, with a reviewer checking your change. | NoviceYou can read the mesh configuration for a service and explain what traffic it allows. You apply a policy someone else has written and confirm the sidecar picked it up, with a reviewer checking your change. | ProficientYou can write traffic policy for a service on your own, including routing rules, retries, circuit breaking and mutual TLS across namespaces. You debug a request the mesh dropped from the proxy logs and metrics rather than guessing. | AdvancedYou can plan a mesh rollout or upgrade across many services without dropping traffic, settle what the mesh owns versus the application, and trace sidecar latency and failures. | AdvancedYou can plan a mesh rollout or upgrade across many services without dropping traffic, settle what the mesh owns versus the application, and trace sidecar latency and failures. | |
| SRE and Reliability6 | |||||
| NoviceYou can follow the runbook for a known alert, and page the right person when the runbook does not cover what you are seeing. | BasicYou can triage an incident, communicate status at a steady cadence, and mitigate a known failure mode without waiting for direction. | AdvancedYou can lead the response to a severe, multi-team incident under real pressure, and keep the communication honest when the news is bad. | AdvancedYou can lead the response to a severe, multi-team incident under real pressure, and keep the communication honest when the news is bad. | ExpertYou can set the incident command process for the organization, train the people who run it, and decide when the process itself needs to change after a bad incident. | |
| NoviceYou can read a service's SLO and error budget dashboard and say whether it is currently within budget. | BasicYou can propose an SLO for a simple service from its actual user impact, and track the error budget it consumes week to week. | ProficientYou can set SLOs for a service with its stakeholders, and use a burning error budget to justify slowing down feature work. | AdvancedYou can set SLOs across a portfolio of services, resolve a dispute between teams about what the objective should be, and retire an SLO that no longer reflects user experience. | ExpertYou can set the SLO methodology for the organization, including how error budgets gate releases, and defend it when a launch is blocked by one. | |
| BasicYou can tune an alert's threshold from real data, and add a missing alert for a failure mode you have just seen happen. | ProficientYou can design a new alert around user-facing symptoms rather than internal signals, and remove an alert that nobody has acted on in months. | AdvancedYou can audit an alerting setup across several services, cut its noise significantly, and get the team to trust paging again. | AdvancedYou can audit an alerting setup across several services, cut its noise significantly, and get the team to trust paging again. | AdvancedYou can audit an alerting setup across several services, cut its noise significantly, and get the team to trust paging again. | |
| BasicYou can write a postmortem for a routine incident, identify contributing causes rather than stopping at the trigger, and track its actions to closure. | ProficientYou can facilitate a postmortem for a complex incident, keep it blameless when tempers are short, and push back on an action item that will not actually prevent recurrence. | ProficientYou can facilitate a postmortem for a complex incident, keep it blameless when tempers are short, and push back on an action item that will not actually prevent recurrence. | AdvancedYou can spot the same contributing cause recurring across several postmortems, and get the underlying fix prioritized over the next incident. | ExpertYou can set how the organization runs and learns from postmortems, and decide when a pattern of incidents means a system should be redesigned rather than patched again. | |
| NoviceYou can take part in a planned failure test on a system, following the test plan someone else wrote. | NoviceYou can take part in a planned failure test on a system, following the test plan someone else wrote. | ProficientYou can run failure experiments against production with real safeguards, and turn a surprising result into a concrete reliability fix. | AdvancedYou can build the case for a failure-testing program across several services, and get sceptical teams to opt in. | AdvancedYou can build the case for a failure-testing program across several services, and get sceptical teams to opt in. | |
| NoviceYou can work through a troubleshooting checklist for a failing host or service and record what each check showed. | BasicYou can find the failing layer in a routine fault, such as a full disk or a blocked port, from its logs and metrics. | AdvancedYou can trace an intermittent or load-dependent fault to its cause by reproducing it under controlled conditions. | AdvancedYou can trace an intermittent or load-dependent fault to its cause by reproducing it under controlled conditions. | ExpertYou can set the diagnostic data every service must expose and the evidence a diagnosis needs before a fix ships. | |
| Cost and DevEx3 | |||||
| NoviceYou can read a cost report and say which services and environments the spend sits in. You carry out a saving someone else has identified, such as deleting unattached volumes, and confirm it in the next bill. | BasicYou can tag resources so spend lands with the owning team, and resize instances you own to match measured usage rather than a guess. | ProficientYou can attribute spend to teams and features, and forecast demand from usage trends to cut cost without weakening reliability. | AdvancedYou can take on spend that has no owner, such as data transfer and shared clusters, and size shared capacity for a launch or migration with no usage history. | ExpertYou can set how the organization attributes, budgets and reviews cloud spend, and decide which purchase commitments it makes. You change spending behavior in teams you do not manage by giving them visibility rather than a cap. | |
| NoviceYou can fix a bug in an existing platform tool or template and add a worked example to it, with a reviewer pairing on the change. You use the tools the way a product engineer would before you change them. | BasicYou can build a template or small command that automates a repetitive operations task, with failure messages that say what to do next. | ProficientYou can ship a golden path for a common task from provisioning to first deploy, and measure the toil it removes to decide what to automate next. | AdvancedYou can make self-service safe for hard tasks such as production access or schema changes, keeping the guardrails without making the path unusable. | ExpertYou can decide which paths the organization paves, which it deliberately leaves open, and when a platform tool is retired. You win adoption from teams you do not manage by making the paved road faster than the alternative. | |
| BasicYou can write a how-to or worked example for a platform feature you have used, and watch someone follow it before you publish it. | ProficientYou can own the documentation for a part of the platform, from onboarding through reference to troubleshooting, and keep it current as the platform ships. You answer the repeat questions in the docs instead of in the support channel. | ProficientYou can own the documentation for a part of the platform, from onboarding through reference to troubleshooting, and keep it current as the platform ships. You answer the repeat questions in the docs instead of in the support channel. | AdvancedYou can plan enablement for a large platform change so teams migrate without queueing at your desk, and restructure documentation that has grown into a maze. | AdvancedYou can plan enablement for a large platform change so teams migrate without queueing at your desk, and restructure documentation that has grown into a maze. | |
| Certifications3 | |||||
| Not required | Not required | Required | Required | Required | |
| Not required | Required | Required | Required | Required | |
| Not required | Not required | Not required | Required | Required | |
| Delivery4 | |||||
| NoviceYou can keep your own tasks and deadlines in a current to-do list, and tell your manager as soon as work you own will be late. | BasicYou can organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay. | ProficientYou can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change. | AdvancedYou can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use. | ExpertYou can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce. | |
| NoviceYou can estimate how long a task will take once the approach is clear, and you say promptly when the estimate turns out to be wrong. | BasicYou can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you. | ProficientYou can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged. | AdvancedYou can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break. | ExpertYou can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and set the estimating method other teams use. | |
| BasicYou can stay responsible after you hand work over: you check it did what it was meant to, fix your own mistakes, and give updates before anyone asks. | ProficientYou can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys. | AdvancedYou can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works. | AdvancedYou can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works. | ExpertYou can report the organization's most exposed outcomes to its leaders as they stand, including bad news, and answer for them. | |
| BasicYou can choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it. | ProficientYou can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short. | AdvancedYou can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet. | AdvancedYou can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet. | ExpertYou can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way. | |
| Craft3 | |||||
| BasicYou can work out what is wrong in work you did not create, and you fix the underlying cause instead of working around the symptom. | ProficientYou can break a large, ambiguous problem into pieces and weigh the options for each against the evidence. | AdvancedYou can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk. | AdvancedYou can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk. | ExpertYou can crack problems the organization has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem. | |
| NoviceYou can apply the basics of your field to the work you are given, and ask an expert when a task goes beyond what you have learned. | BasicYou can work confidently with the tools and methods your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals. | ProficientYou can advise the team on your area and apply new developments in the field where they pay off. | AdvancedYou can bring in good practice from outside the organization and make it work here, and your judgment clearly improves the work you touch. | ExpertYou can influence how the field is practiced beyond this organization, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years. | |
| ProficientYou can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse. | ProficientYou can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse. | AdvancedYou can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too. | AdvancedYou can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too. | ExpertYou can set what the organization invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement. | |
| Communication4 | |||||
| BasicYou can explain your work so your team can act on it, and play a request back in your own words before you act on it. | ProficientYou can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them. | AdvancedYou can bring disagreeing groups to agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame a difficult or sensitive message. | AdvancedYou can bring disagreeing groups to agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame a difficult or sensitive message. | ExpertYou can set how the organization communicates by creating the forums and norms that teams use to share information. | |
| BasicYou can work well with people in other roles, share context and credit, and take criticism of your work without defending territory. | ProficientYou can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you. | AdvancedYou can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment. | AdvancedYou can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment. | ExpertYou can remove the barriers that stop teams working together by putting in place routines and forums they use across the organization. | |
| BasicYou can document your own work well enough for a colleague to follow it unaided, such as a how-to guide or a handover, and keep it current as things change. | ProficientYou can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion. | AdvancedYou can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on. | AdvancedYou can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on. | ExpertYou can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on. | |
| NoviceYou can keep your manager and immediate team informed of your progress, and you raise an issue before someone else discovers it. | BasicYou can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a frequency that suits them. | ProficientYou can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts. | AdvancedYou can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust. | ExpertYou can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it. | |
| Leadership3 | |||||
| NoviceYou can act on direction well, seek feedback on how you work, and be open about what you need help with. | BasicYou can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group. | ProficientYou can lead one piece of work shared by several people, on your own team and beyond, and make calls that they act on. | AdvancedYou can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead. | ExpertYou can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own. | |
| NoviceYou can share what you have just learned with your peers and help a newer colleague find their way around. | BasicYou can help someone new settle into your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on. | ProficientYou can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn. | AdvancedYou can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team. | ExpertYou can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field. | |
| NoviceYou can explain why the work you were given matters and who it is for. | BasicYou can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them. | ProficientYou can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now. | AdvancedYou can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged. | ExpertYou can shape the organization's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up. | |
Use this ladder with your own team
For managers and HR teams: create a free account, then add platform and DevOps from Departments → Add from template in one click: all 36 skills, with the mastery expected at each of your 5 career levels.