← Role Archetypes
Platform Engineering Track

Graduate Platform Engineer

SFIA 1-2
GPE → JPE → IMPE → SPE →
TTL → EM
LSE → PA
→ HoE → VP

Building foundational cloud and infrastructure skills under close guidance, learning CI/CD and IaC basics, and developing awareness of the developer experience the platform team exists to provide.

🚀

Next step pathway

Graduate Platform Engineer to Junior Platform Engineer

→
☍

Performance Calibration

Graduate Platform Engineer - Performance Levels

↗
☑

Behaviour Tracker

Graduate Platform Engineer - Performance Tracker

↗
Overview

As a Graduate Platform Engineer, you are at the start of your platform engineering career. Your primary goal is to learn - how cloud infrastructure works, how CI/CD pipelines are structured, how Kubernetes operates, and how the team's tooling and ways of working fit together. You work under close guidance from senior engineers, contributing to small, well-scoped tasks and building the habits that will underpin your career.

You are not expected to work independently on complex infrastructure problems yet. You are expected to ask questions, absorb feedback, apply it consistently, and develop growing curiosity about the systems you support. At this level, the most important behaviours are curiosity, carefulness, and a genuine interest in how things work.

Key Responsibilities

Learning and Development

  • Actively engage with onboarding materials, internal runbooks, and platform documentation.
  • Pair regularly with senior platform engineers to build understanding of the infrastructure and deployment patterns.
  • Seek feedback proactively and apply it consistently to your work.
  • Build familiarity with the team's tooling - Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD systems, observability platforms - at a conceptual and practical level.
  • Develop awareness of the developer experience the platform team provides - what internal users need and how the platform serves them.

Delivery

  • Deliver small, clearly scoped infrastructure tasks with close guidance from a senior engineer.
  • Write IaC and pipeline configuration that meets the team's quality and style standards with appropriate support.
  • Participate in code reviews - both receiving feedback and beginning to review others' work with guidance.
  • Raise blockers quickly rather than remaining stuck independently.
  • Update runbooks and documentation when making changes, so the team's knowledge base stays current.

Operations and Observability Awareness

  • Learn the team's approach to monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
  • Participate in on-call rotations in a shadow capacity, observing how incidents are investigated and resolved.
  • Develop basic understanding of what healthy infrastructure looks like - metrics, logs, dashboards - and what anomalies indicate problems.

Collaboration

  • Contribute actively in team ceremonies - stand-ups, retrospectives, and planning sessions.
  • Build positive working relationships with teammates and the software engineering teams the platform serves.
  • Communicate progress, questions, and blockers clearly and promptly.
Role Specific

Cloud and Infrastructure Foundations

Build working knowledge of cloud fundamentals - compute, storage, networking, IAM basics - and the team's chosen cloud platform, through paired delivery and structured learning.

CI/CD Awareness

Develop understanding of how CI/CD pipelines work - what triggers a build, how artefacts are produced, how deployments are gated - by working alongside experienced engineers on real delivery tasks.

Developer Experience Orientation

Begin developing an understanding of internal developer experience - what software engineers need from the platform, what friction looks like, and why reducing that friction matters.

Behaviours

Learning & Growth

  • Approaches every infrastructure task as an opportunity to learn how systems work, not just to complete the task.
  • Asks questions without hesitation - particularly "what would happen if this went wrong?" and "how would we know?"
  • Applies feedback consistently and tracks personal development over time.
  • Reads documentation, explores cloud console UIs, and experiments in sandbox environments to build intuition.
  • Reflects regularly on their own progress, identifying gaps and discussing them with their TTL or mentor.
  • Shows willingness to learn from mistakes without defensiveness - infrastructure mistakes are learning opportunities when caught in non-production.
  • Seeks out pairing and shadowing opportunities proactively, particularly around incident response and deployments.

Delivery

  • Completes assigned infrastructure tasks reliably within agreed timeframes with close guidance.
  • Raises blockers early rather than pushing through silently - particularly important in infrastructure work where wrong assumptions can have broad impact.
  • Takes quality seriously from the start, even on small configuration changes.
  • Follows the agreed development workflow - branching, committing, opening PRs, getting review before applying changes.
  • Responds to review feedback promptly and addresses it thoroughly before requesting re-review.
  • Keeps task status up to date in the team's tracking tools.
  • Makes incremental, reviewable commits with clear messages describing what infrastructure changed and why.

Quality & Craft

  • Writes IaC and pipeline configuration that is readable and follows the team's style conventions with support.
  • Develops an instinct for safety - understanding that infrastructure changes can have wide blast radius and checking carefully before applying.
  • Reads and understands the test coverage and validation patterns for infrastructure changes they are making.
  • Follows the team's change management and review process - not applying configuration changes without going through review, even for "small" changes.
  • Avoids submitting configuration with known issues or unexplained hardcoded values without prior discussion.
  • Updates runbooks and documentation as part of their definition of done.

Communication

  • Provides clear, concise updates in stand-ups - what they worked on, what they plan to do, what is blocking them.
  • Writes PR descriptions that explain what infrastructure is changing, why, and how to verify the change is correct.
  • Asks questions in writing when appropriate so that answers can benefit the wider team.
  • Communicates learning needs honestly with their TTL and mentor.
  • Responds to messages and review comments promptly during working hours.
  • Summarises their understanding when given verbal instructions to confirm correct interpretation - especially important in infrastructure contexts where misunderstandings can cause outages.

Collaboration

  • Contributes positively to team energy and culture.
  • Communicates openly and asks for help when needed.
  • Respects the expertise of more experienced colleagues while building their own voice.
  • Participates actively in stand-ups, retrospectives, planning sessions, and team discussions.
  • Pairs with senior engineers willingly and engages during sessions rather than passively observing.
  • Builds awareness of what software engineering teams need from the platform - treating them as customers, not just requesters.
  • Respects agreed team norms around working hours, communication channels, and on-call responsibilities.

Ownership

  • Takes responsibility for completing tasks they have committed to, rather than waiting to be chased.
  • Follows through on review actions and does not consider a change done until it has met all agreed criteria and been verified.
  • Flags uncertainty about infrastructure requirements or approach rather than making assumptions - particularly important given the blast radius of infrastructure errors.
  • Keeps their own task board updated so the team always has an accurate picture of progress.
  • Owns their learning plan and does not wait for opportunities to be handed to them.
  • Acknowledges mistakes openly, explains what happened, and focuses on what they will do differently next time.

Technical Foundation

  • Develops working knowledge of cloud fundamentals and applies it in delivered infrastructure tasks under guidance.
  • Uses Git competently for branching, committing, and raising pull requests as part of everyday work.
  • Reads and navigates existing Terraform, Helm charts, and CI/CD configuration to understand context before making changes.
  • Begins to understand the team's deployment, release, and rollback process at a conceptual level.
  • Builds familiarity with Kubernetes at a practical level - applying and understanding manifests, reading pod logs, using kubectl for basic operations.
  • Understands the basic architecture of the systems they are supporting well enough to make safe, localised configuration changes.
  • Develops awareness of cloud security fundamentals - IAM, network security groups, secret management - and why they matter.
Skills
Foundational understanding of at least one cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) - compute, storage, networking basics.
Basic understanding of containerisation - what Docker does and how images are structured.
Beginning familiarity with a CI/CD tool (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Tekton, or equivalent).
Basic understanding of version control (Git) and infrastructure-as-code concepts.
Ability to read and understand existing Terraform or YAML configuration with guidance.
Growing familiarity with Kubernetes at a conceptual level - pods, services, deployments.
Clear written and verbal communication skills.
AI AI & Automation Expectations Updated for the AI-augmented era

AI Augmented Delivery

  • Uses AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude) as a learning accelerant, not a shortcut - the goal is to understand what generated Terraform or YAML is doing, not just to get it applying cleanly.
  • Validates every piece of AI-generated infrastructure configuration before applying it - treats AI output as a draft requiring careful review, not a finished answer, particularly given the blast radius of infrastructure changes.
  • Asks "why does this configuration work?" about AI-generated IaC, not just "does it apply?" - builds genuine understanding of resource relationships and cloud primitives.
  • Recognises that AI can confidently generate cloud configuration with subtle security or cost issues - overly permissive IAM policies, missing encryption settings - and develops instinct for spotting these.
  • Uses AI to help understand Kubernetes concepts, cloud networking patterns, and CI/CD configuration - with verification at each step.
  • Treats prompt engineering as a learnable skill and develops it deliberately alongside technical skills - providing cloud provider context, existing resource constraints, and security requirements.